Life In The 19th Century

I was working on genealogy, but am stuck with one of my great-grandfathers named George A Rogers or Rodgers. He was born in the US about 1854, and married at age 35, but five years later, his wife dies and his two young sons are raised by their maternal grandparents. I'm doing this on ancestor.com, and found two family trees done by my cousins, but we're all stymied.

A fire destroyed the national census data from 1890, which might have been the key. His two sons have what sound like family names (Calame, Payne) as middle names, but I don't find genealogies with those families connected to Rogers. I need the history detectives.

A lot of my ancestors emigrated to America and passed through New York in the mid-19th century, and Gotham, the history of NYC that I'm reading, does a good job of describing that era.

Garden Update 5/26

We'll have a few more days of cool weather, possibly even some rain, and then it warms back into the 90's. I'm burning through the stored rain water, so it would be nice to collect some late season rain. The squash is getting ready to flower, which is good, because I'm down to 2 quarts of last year's squash. I put out the final 4 tomato plants. I was hoping to space the planting exactly a month apart from the first set, but I could see these last 4 wanted to go into the garden now.

The red onion flowers have started to droop to the ground, but the bees are still interested, so I'll leave them alone to dry and develop seeds. My next garden jobs will be to plant a long row of pole beans, to trim the almond tree, and to add to the tomato cages.

The compost seems to be breaking down well. It's all in a big pile, directly on the ground, in the spot where I have had the best luck. I've been watering it every so often and burying the kitchen waste in a hole at the bottom of the pile. When the yellow onions come out of the south bed, I'll work in all the compost that's ready into that soil, and immediately plant yellow and butternut squash.