thomascochran.com

Most of my friends don’t think of me as southern, and frankly, neither do I. But I can’t ignore the undeniable heritage I have tying me to the South. With the help of some knowledgeable family members as well as a freshly minted ancestry.com membership, I have set out on a quest to learn more about my roots.

My father was born and raised in North Carolina and our roots deep into the early 1700’s in the Tar Heel State. With the online research I’ve done via ancestry.com, I’ve revealed an intriguing array of family members. People that share my genes but were alive when Lincoln was President, or Washington, or even before the Declaration of Independence.

James Reid Cochran was born in Rutherford County on the 5th of November, 1839. He lived a very rural farmer’s life in Camp Creek, NC until the age of 22. James enlisted in the Confederate States Army as a Corporal on March 24th, 1862. For a frame of reference, a short month prior to this, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the President of the Confederate States of America. A month later, on April 21st, James was at Camp Mangum, outside of Raleigh, where he joined up with the North Carolina 50th Infantry Regiment, company G.

James fought with the North Carolina 50th in the Battle of New Bern, against General Tecumseh Sherman’s Union forces in both the Battle of Averasborough, and the Battle of Bentonville. His regiment surrendered to Union forces on April 26th, 1865.

James found his way back to Rutherford County and on the 17th of May, 1874 he married Eliza Catherine Moss. The two of them had six children (his daughter Elizabeth is my great-grandmother) until Eliza passed away at the age of 50 in 1888. He remarried a couple years later, had three more children and then died at the age of 60 on the 11th of January, 1900. William McKinley was President and the house that I now own and reside in was just being built.

James Reid Cochran, my great-great-grandfather.

Bill Murray cracks me up.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Gold futures jumped above $700 an ounce Tuesday, hitting a fresh 25-year high, fueled by relentless investor buying on geopolitical tensions and worries about inflation.

Dealers said talk that economists urged China to quadruple its gold reserves to 2,500 tons from the current 600 tons because its foreign exchange reserves had become the world’s largest also stoked the gold rally.

A jump in platinum and copper overnight in Asian trade boosted gold as well, hoisting its price 3 percent by midday.

“I think that platinum helped gold more than anything else,” said a gold trader at a precious metals refiner in New York. “But that China story certainly helps.”

June delivery gold on the New York Mercantile Exchange’s COMEX division rose $21.90 to $701.80 an ounce, the loftiest level for futures since September 1980.

In January of that year, New York gold futures set their record high above $870.

New York, the priciest American city, fell to No. 27 on world list.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – For the first time in nearly a generation, Tokyo no longer ranks as the world’s most expensive city, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Economist Group.

The biannual survey, which covers 130 countries, found Oslo, Norway as No. 1 in terms of cost of living. Tokyo fell to No. 2. The last time Tokyo did not lead all other cities was in 1991 when, due to an overvalued official currency exchange rate, Tehran briefly led the charge.

Flexcar (as well as it’s competitor Zipcar) is one of the best business innovations to come along in recent years. The whole idea of flexible car sharing is something that really makes a whole lot of sense, especially in an urban environment.

These are the websites that I use on a daily basis. Check em out…

I’m going to mess around with writing a blog for a couple weeks to see how I like it. I suspect it will be tremendously time consuming to write a blog, but from time to time maybe I’ll be able to find some interesting tid bits of information to post here…

Stay tuned