Kudos to Martha O. Haynie's office

The Orange County Comptroller is without a doubt the most capable public official in this neck of the woods.

Now, her office is deserving of extra credit for their efforts at making local land records more accessible.

Until recently, only records dating back to 1955 were available online.

Now, however, ye socks may peruse deeds and plats dating back more than a century beyond that date. Click here to check it out:

http://or.occompt.com/recorder/eagleweb/docSearch.jsp

Even if your family's roots around here aren't as deep as my own, you may still get a kick out of tracing back the genealogy of your home.

For instance, after visiting a friend's vacant lot on Lake Pineloch today, I thought I'd do a little investigating of my own. Not only did I discover it was part of an 80-acre state land grant to pioneer Jesse Bumby dated 1869; but after it was subdivided into smaller parcels, it was part of the 5 acres owned by my great-aunt and uncle Nellie (nee Patrick) and James Neal from 1912 to 1916.

Who'da thunk it?!

RIP Glenn Hennig

My thoughts today are with the Hennig family, who lost their patriarch Glenn back on 4/28 and will be memorializing him this morning.

If I hadn't already made plans to be out of town this weekend, I'd be there myself--not just because he was a Gators fan and a distant relative, but because the Hennigs are just good people and had to endure the all-too-familiar battle with Alzheimer's Disease.

The Sentinel published a fairly good obit, which I'll attach to this posting.

Of course, they fail to make the aforementioned genealogical connection to yours truly. So, I'll fill ye socks in here.

Mr. Hennig's mother was Effie Johns Hennig; daughter of John C. Johns; and granddaughter of Rebecca Patrick Johns. Rebecca was a youngers sister of my ancestor William Wright "Dink" Patrick, Orange County's sheriff during the Reconstruction Era.

Brick Walls - - - genealogically speaking

Anyone who has engaged in the pursuit of genealogy for any amount of time has encountered a "brick wall."

That's the term we root-searchers use to label "end of line individuals," those most elusive of ancestors who seem to have appeared out of thin air because we can't find any documentary evidence of their origins.

Anyway, one of my brick walls has been a young lady by the name of Mary Eliza Robertson. She married a fellow named John Patrick in Wayne County, Georgia, back in 1836. Sadly, she was killed by those dastardly Seminoles who were raiding Nassau County up in North Florida in May 1840. And, that's about all I know of her.

Her widower John quickly remarried to his sister-in-law Linnia Robertson, and the two of them came down here to Central Florida. In fact, they homesteaded land not far from where I live in Apopka.

But, I digress.

Despite many years of digging, I have not been able to find anything about the origins of Mary Eliza. (Or, her sister Linnia, for that matter!)

That is, until today. I think I am finally beginning to assemble enough pieces of the puzzle to at least form the hypothesis that they were daughters of a dude named Josiah Robertson.

Here's a link to the notes I've collected so far. Any input would be appreciated!

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~oldpinecastle/robertson/robertsonnotes.html