Collier/Cohen/Kochinsky Connection

This past year has been extremely stressful and exciting all at the same time! I am almost finished with my first year of nursing school... at age 53! This is so hard to do but I believe when I'm finished it will be such a good thing for me as well as everyone around me. I am making new friends and learning SOOOO much! This is why I am not able to do any family research right now. Still, I can't wait until the 1940 US Census is released!!

Wow! It has been so long since I've written anything here. I have once again upgraded my software to FTM 2005. So far I really like it. I've been very busy doing other hobbies over the past many months but recently got the "bug" once again to continue my family research. It's very exciting to find quite a few families in the census onine.

I have upgraded my software to the latest version. Now, I am wondering if there is a way to split my database into two separate trees, without having to type each person in again. Right now I have all of our family (my husband's and mine) in one big tree. I was thinking about keeping that, but would like to have one tree of my family, and another of my husband's. Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.

I was reading through my favorite genealogy magazine, Family Chronicle, and got the urge to try to document some recent family history. I believe this happened in 2001, but the year is not certain. My cousin's sons (both of them,) had broken out of the county jail in Brunswick County, North Carolina, and along with a third young man, fled to Lewistown, Pennsylvania where one of them had a girlfriend living there. They were, of course tracked down and there apparently was a brief hostage-type of situation, before they were all three arrested and charged with a host of things. The names of my two relatives involved are Jackie Naylor, Jr. and Randle L. Naylor. My frustration comes with not being able to locate this story online anymore. At the time of the incident, I was able to read all about it through the Lewistown Sentinel, but they do not allow searching of archives online, or at least I can't figure out how, if they do. I neglected to print the article out previously. I won't make that mistake again!

I'm trying... just not very successful in organizing my time in order to regularly update this site. There will come a time though... I'm hoping to post a page which shows all the gravesites I visited last summer. They were located mostly in Brunswick County, North Carolina.

My HOLDEN ancesters mostly resided in North Carolina. Jesse Durant HOLDEN, had three wives with children by two of them. Jesse had seven surviving children with his first wife, Evelena, and three surviving children with Rosa CLEMMONS.

Jesse's father, George HOLDEN

The story behind our COHEN name is a little strange and complicated. My husband's father was born Carl COHEN and at some point after 1930, changed his last name to COLLIER. He married a Bernice before that and had a son, Donald COHEN, the early part of 1930. According to the 1930 US census, they lived in New York City. When Carl met my husband, Gary's mother, Eleanore KOSINSKI, his name had already changed and I believe they married about 1956 (haven't found any concrete info on that.) Carl had two brothers and two sisters, Sidney, Joseph, Margaret, and Sylvia, according to 1910 and 1930 Federal Census reports I have found. Since Carl's parents were born in Russia, my search has been slow-going. I have determined that the family spent most of it's formative years in Massachusetts, although the daughter, Sylvia was born in North Carolina, according to the Federal Censuses. This is just a taste of what I've been through researching this family.