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Originally posted 31 January 2009.
I reckon it among my felicities, " Franklin told his Scottish friend Kames, "That I can set my own razor and shave myself perfectly well, in which I have a daily pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is otherwise obliged to suffer sometimes from dull razors and the dirty fingers or bad breath of a slovenly barber."
The naked philosopher [a reference to BF's penchant for 'air baths'] pondered matters large and small, among them why shaving himself was such a pleasure. Franklin and Kames had been comparing notes on true happiness; Franklin summarized for them both: "I have long been of an opinion similar to that you express, and think happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life."
from
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H.W. Brands, p. 411-2
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Originally posted 22 July 2007.
After visiting no. 2 son, we decided to leave early on Tuesday to stop at Newport, Indiana where we have Edwards and Brinley ancestors. We first went to the Newport Library where we found a few things and then the courthouse where I looked through guardianship records since my Margaret Edwards ancestress had become orphaned in about 1851. At the public library, there were about four or five big fat binders of listings in which cemeteries of Vermillion County were listed in alphabetical order with further listings of those buried in those cemeteries. I asked if there was a master index for the cemetery listings, but alas was told that there was not. The man working at this library was a wonderfully helpful person. I pulled the first binder off the shelf. Since I knew which two of the five townships my Edwards ancestors had been, I skipped the first two cemeteries which were in other townships. The first cemetery listed for Helt township was Bales Cemetery. I could not believe my good fortune (aka serendipidy) to find my Edwards ancestors in the very first cemetery listing I looked. So after visiting the courthouse; Sam, Abbie, and I were on our way to the cemetery way out in the country on a farm.
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Originally posted 18 July 2007.
My dad, Robert Allen Lee, was born in Kane, Pennsylvania, May 3, 1935. He died here at home (Clever, Missouri) this morning July 18, 2007.
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Originally posted 3 March 2008.
Here's a photo of my dad Robert Allen Lee, compliments of my sister Debbie, at about age 1. 
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Originally posted 1 January 2009.
Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG has written an article of which the opening paragraph so aptly describes what I love about genealogy that I'm copying it here:
Modern genealogy—appropriately done—is history in microcosm. Our
research projects study “up close and personal” small slices of the
past. We pluck individuals from the nameless masses that historians
paint with a broad brush. We learn their names. We follow them from birth to
death. We see the actual effect upon human lives of the grand world events that
historians write about—wars, economic depressions, plagues, politics, and perse-
cutions. We see how one humble person and his or her neighbors can reshape a
community, a state, or a country. Then we repeat the process, generation by gen-
eration.
This was originally published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ), Volume 91, pp. 260-77.