Tom Cooley
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Stories (6)
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Distant Ship's Smoke
My great uncle Jack never told me much in the way of details about his near drowning when I saw him in the summer of '21. I've researched the events leading up to and culminating with his drowning in our timeline, though, so I never really pressed him for details of what it must have been like to survive, when many on the ship hadn't.
By Tom Cooley5 years ago in Families
The Next Few Years Will Be Good for Ancestral Research
Back when I started researching my family tree in the early 2000s, there were a lot of personal family tree websites online (with varying degrees of accuracy) and often the creators of those sites lacked a sense of privacy and identity theft concerns. Fortunately, people seem to be more aware of those issues these days. Family history books which contain private information about living people and were written before the internet existed no longer seem to appear in Google searches, which is a good thing!
By Tom Cooley5 years ago in Families
Just Like Fishin'
"Let's go "shoppin'", Thomas," said my grandpa, sometime back in the 80s. Grandpa was in his 70s at the time, so he needed a bit of help with the "shoppin'" he had in mind, as I was soon to discover. Next door to his business was a thrift store. Grandpa shopped in the dumpster out back for dress shoes which fit his size 11 EE feet perfectly, 1950s era stainless steel Sunbeam toasters that just needed a new cord and a bit of cleaning to make the most perfectly browned toast you've ever seen and other similar goodies. "One man's trash is another man's treasure, ain't that right, Thomas?" I nodded. "They're getting downright stingy over here, these days, not like they used to be, wha?" I'd never been over here before, so I couldn't judge, but we only found one item in need of a new cord that day. Apparently, though, that was stingy of the thrift store's owners in comparison to former times in the past year or two.
By Tom Cooley5 years ago in Styled
The 1932 Saratoga Gold Rush
December 5th, 1959 Tom asked me to write up my memories of the gold rush in Saratoga back in ‘32. If you’re old enough, perhaps you remember reading some stories about it in your local paper in July or early August of 1932. As is frequently the case, the newspapers didn’t get the full scoop. I’ve flipped through a few of the little black books which I'd used as journals to refresh my memory of decades past. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you about 1932 in a minute here without troubling you too much with detours into the years before 1932.
By Tom Cooley5 years ago in FYI
