Photo Effects

Another fun challenge from Genea-Musings - to use Anymaking.com to create fun pictures!

This was a bit like what we did for Learning 2.0 and some of the effects are like the ones on Photobooth. My contributions are above since I don't think I can move them around to different spots on the blog posting.

Shared birthdays

Another Genea-Musings challenge since I haven't done one in a while! So this one is to find someone in your genealogy file that has the same birthday as yourself. I use iFamily so I went to Events and then Events Dates to find someone with the same birthday, June 4.

There actually were a number of people. The oldest is John Kidder born in 1707, next is Lammert Kool born in 1877, then Geziena Lubbers born in 1879, Maria Schrotenboer in 1884, Aagje Groenhof in 1888, and Priscilla Houg in 1909. There are more but I don't know much specific information about any of these people. None are direct ancestors. Yep, that's all!

Halloween past

So the other day I was trying to name all the costumes my kids have worn for Halloween. It actually was kind of hard! It was almost easier to remember what they worn when they were really little because I had more say. Now they do what ever they want! The picture is from 2003. This was a big year. I put a lot of time into the cat & bat costumes and we visited my niece at school (in the picture), my cousin with her new baby in the hospital and my work! Long, long day! I think the kids picked what they wanted for costumes but they still kind of matched. So these are some of my favorite costumes despite staying up late to add the boa trim to Claire's :)

Scanning slides - update

Well, the organization portion of the slide scanning has not gone very well. Especially the July 1977 slides from the family trip out west through Colorado and other places. Since I don't remember the trip at all, it is difficult to match up the description on the back of the slide case to the actual slide. BUT the slides CANNOT sit any longer gathering dust and waiting for the cat to have a spaz attack in the middle of them (again). I have scanned 158 slides with the date from the slide and a number. I still have many more to go!

So above is a picture from the group I scanned recently. Horses walking along the road BUT with the additional treat of my brother hanging out the window! I find these picture, with someone in the mirror, quite amusing. I cannot image my father didn't stop to look at things during the trip since the Sunday drives we took in our youth were very long and boring. But my mother took quite a few pictures, some slightly blurred, out of the moving car so there are shots of my Mom in the mirror or my father's arm while he is driving. This was life pre-digital!

Back to school!

Well, the kids went back to school this week, finally! For the first time every, the kids are in different schools with different start times. So the pictures I took this year are of them individually rather than together. That makes me a little sad :( We have four years before they will both be in HIGH SCHOOL together! Yikes!

As you can see, Peter wasn't thrilled with the photo and it was kind of dark still. Claire is almost always happy about pictures so she actually smiled!

Pilgrim Home Cemetery

I took a ton of pictures while visiting the Pilgrim Home Cemetery and I still haven't sorted through them all! I was working on adding photos to find-a-grave but I am having some problems which have soured my liking of the site, at least for now.

The picture posted here was one of the ones I was excited about getting! This is my great-grandfather Brandt's sister. I think she and her husband Obbe helped my great-grandparent's out during the Depression with a place to live in Oakland. I will have to double check on that part though. I think I need to spend a bit more time on this portion of the family.

Book recommendation

I have been working my way through The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom. Let me just say, you need to look at this book just to see the pictures (by Reid S. Yalom) that are all at the beginning of the book. They are very cool to look at! The cover is one of the pictures and I really like it :)

I am enjoying the book and finding it very informative. I have been reading a bit at a time since it is hard to digest 400 years of history in three weeks! I am not even half way so I will be spending a few more weeks with it. (I actually read really fast but right now I have to read for a committee I am on so I don't have as much time to devote to non-teen books.)

But if you are at all interested in cemeteries, which most genealogist are, check out this book!

Groenhof Immigration from the Netherlands to America

The Nederlandsch-Amerikaansche Stoomvaart Maatschappij Company was founded 1871 as

Plate, Reuchlin & Company in Rotterdam and became known as the Holland America Line. The ship which transported the Groenhof family to America was built in 1881 and purchased from the White Star Line. It was renamed the Spaarndam and was 4,529 tons. This ship was scrapped in 1901.

Minne Groenhof (age 40) arrived in New York on April 12, 1890 with his wife Maria (age 37) and their 6 children: Gerben (age 10), Berend (age 8), Aafke (age 6), Lucas (age 4), Wepkje (age 2) and Klassje (age 6 months). Minne was listed as a farmer from the Netherlands with 6 pieces of baggage. The family probably left from Rotterdam and would have spent about ten days aboard the ship.

Although the reason for the family's immigration is not known, it could have been because of the cheap fare available at the time or that they had family already living in the United States.

Maria had at least one brother living in Michigan. The family would have received news and might have felt it was a good time to move. Minne's parents had also passed away, which might have made the move easier to make at that time.

New project

This week, I was contacted by my cousin's mother-in-law. She is interested in genealogy and had been researching my cousin's father's side. My aunt had her contact me because of my genealogy information for the Naber's. Now it wasn't hard to just send her a tree with the ancestors but she really wanted something she could share with my cousin that he would be interested in. And only genealogist are interested in looking at family group sheets! But a narration of the family history with stories is something different. Unfortunately, I don't have anything written out. And I am not even sure I will ever be able to do so.

But last fall when I attend the Western Michigan Genealogy Society's Got Ancestors Conference, I attended a session with George Morgan about creating time line/outlines for each ancestor. This is something I would like to do and I think it would be easier to create a narration from this than off the cuff. On the other hand, I did do one interesting thing for my father's side of the family that everyone (non-genealogists) seemed to think was interested. I created a one page document about his ancestors immigration to the United States with pictures. So this is something I can do for the other immigration family's as well. I will be posting the information from the one I already did and then any future ones as well!

Design your own Tombstone

Okay, this one is a little weird. My children talked about the stones they liked when I dragged them to the cemetery and I didn't like that! But Genea-Musings has issued a challenge to create one for yourself. So here is mine. I chose a flat stone for no reason at all. I would also like black stone but I forgot to switch the color. I choose a single stone with a book (because I am a librarian) and the flowers to dress it up. I like having my full name as well as complete dates.

iFamily for Leopard, Updated!

I think I mentioned in a previous post that iFamily didn't seem to have any updates so I thought I would have to switch programs. Fortunately, this is not true any longer! There is an update available to previous owners so now my program has stopped asking me to check for updates. Frankly, I didn't even care what the updates were, I just wanted the message to stop!

After I updated, I started a new file that would include sourcing for everyone in the file. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be for my mother's side of the family. I actually reached the 4th great-grandfather generation (for my children), at least with names. But I did discover that I don't have my father's birth record so I am not able to go farther on that side until I get a hold of him. I also have nothing added for my husband's family for the exact same reason. Something to work on!

Cemetery / 3rd day

Today I spent a lot of time in the Zeeland Cemetery. This is a large cemetery. It started out overcast but got hot, again! My daughter was forced to come along with me and soon tired out and had to go to the bathroom. I think the bathroom was a ploy since I ignored it and she didn't ask to go when we did leave!

I actually had a map with the sections shown. I also had some of the plot numbers. This helped somewhat but the numbering system used never became clear to me! I still had to walk up and down each row looking for the names on my list. My favorite tombstone of the day is shown above. I am actually not related by blood to this person but I think we are related in spirit!

Visiting cemeteries

I have visited two cemeteries this week, one yesterday and one today. And I dragged/bribed my children to come along. They really didn't help a ton but it was nice to have someone there. And they did look for names! My daughter didn't want to look by herself so the two of them looked together.

Yesterday we went to the Beaverdam Cemetery. It was so HOT. I started taking pictures of every stone but that didn't last long with the heat. It doesn't seem like it would be a big deal to just take pictures but yes, it was! I did find most of the graves I wanted and the ones I didn't find might not even have stones. That is part of the organization problem. I probably have a listing from the cemetery records at the library, but not on my computer. Nor linked to my cemetery file. I have visited this cemetery before but it was before I had a digital camera so it was nice to have digital copies to add to my computer records.

I actually have two sets of direct ancestors at this cemetery. The de Vries pair do not have a stone. The only stone from that family is for the daughter who died in 1881. As you can tell from the picture above, the stone is very worn and difficult to read. The girl was named Jantje and she died when she was 20 years old. I haven't looked up a death record for her yet so I am not sure the cause of her death. Her younger brother died about the same age but I don't even have exact dates for him. The two surviving brothers are the ancestors that connect my parents trees.

The other couple are Jan & Jantje Beld. Their stone is also in bad shape but someone had added plaques since the last time I had been out there, about 10 years ago.

Today we went to the Benthiem Cemetery. This was my very first visit there. My direct ancestor, Reijer Sneller, is buried there but doesn't not have a stone. So there wasn't any big discoveries. All the pictures I took were for distant relatives or just very old stones. It was a very nice cemetery but was being mowed so there was a lot of grass clippings to move aside.

I also spent a lot of time adding the pictures and records to Find A Grave. This website is a collection of cemetery records and photos added by anyone who has an interest. It is a great site!

I am trying to decide if I should visit another cemetery tomorrow to make it three in a row or to swing by the library and make some copies from the cemetery records.

4th of July

This weekend we celebrate Independence Day otherwise known as the 4th of July. Since the 4th is actually a Sunday this year, we will be observing the holiday on Monday the 5th instead. (Really that means we have a holiday from work on Monday.)

While scanning slides, I came across the Bicentennial parade held in 1976. Since I was only 5 years old, I don't really remember this event but it seemed like a big deal. My Mom actually took like 20 pictures! The picture above is of my sister Deb. She is the one playing the flute in the red pants & blue shirt. I believe she is in middle school, 8th grade, going to high school in the fall.

Have a great holiday weekend!

Scanning Slides

My family has slides. Back in the good old days (70's & 80's), slides were popular and I really do not understand why! Film still had to be sent in since each picture has its own little holder. You had to have a projector and screen (or a blank wall). And you had to have a willing or captive audience. I know that we as a family watched the slides because we had a projector. But it seems like a labor intensive event. Plus my mother had to sort the slides into the holders, making sure they were facing the correct direction and label the back of the case for each picture.

So now the slides are in my possession and I have to scan each one into a digital format so that everyone in my family can enjoy the old pictures without having a projector. I actually love my scanner, a Epson Perfection V300, but it is time consuming. Plus I have to reorganize the pictures since they had been separated by who was in the picture at one point. This was in order to hand off the slides to the individuals but that really isn't very practical since some pictures have more than one person AND you would need a projector to view them! We have 11 holders which hold 100 pictures each. YOU do the math!

By the way, the picture is me at about 4 with my favorite animals! There are lots of pictures of me and kitties :) As you can see the scan came out pretty good and I only did a little color modification to brighten it up.

Prolific Fathers

Genea-Musings Saturday challenge is to find the most prolific dad in your tree. Well, I couldn't find a way for iFamily for Leopard to pull this out for me so I am going with two prolific brothers. These brothers are the bridge between my parents family tree.

The older brother, Jacob De Vries, is my father's Great-Great grandfather on his mother's side. Jacob and his wife Agnes produced 11 children, 2 of which didn't survive to adulthood. The second brother is Johannes, my mother's Great-Great grandfather on her mother's side. Johannes and his wife Gertrude (pictured above) produced 12 children, 2 of which didn't survive to adulthood.

Happy Father's Day!

Tombstone edition

Well, June started quickly and now is half way done! So I thought I had better post something before the month totally disappeared. I am still working on the information I mentioned in my last post. I was going to spend today doing more lookups but other things have come up. After this posting, I hope to get a little bit done.

Let's look at a tombstone today. Some of my favorites are in the East Holland Cemetery. I especially love the three large ones that mark Aaltje Hellenthal, her husband Jan J and one of their daughters, Cornelia. The picture above is for Aaltje. Not only do I love the size of this stone, but there is a lot of information. It gives her maiden name and her husband's along with her birth and death dates. We also know that her husband died before her and since everything is in Dutch, that shows her heritage as well!

Additionally, I know that Aaltje was my Great-Great Grandmother. She was born in Fillmore Township, Michigan in 1854, married Johannes Naber in 1876 and died in 1919 at the age of 64. She had 6 children. Her oldest Anna died at the age of 22, within a year of giving birth to her first child. Her 2nd child, Johannes lived into adulthood but I don't have an exact date for him. He is not buried in the East Holland Cemetery where most of the others are located. Gertrude is the 3rd child and again, I don't have a lot of information on her. I know that she had three children. The 4th & 5th children were both named Cornelia. The 1st Cornelia died when she was only 2 years old. The second Cornelia died at the age of 19. She is buried next to her parents. The youngest child was Walter, my great-grandfather. Walter lived to the ripe old age of 79 and ran the family farm, which passed to two of his sons.

My SWEET Dutch Genealogy!

I was reading the newest issue of the Family Tree Magazine (August 2010) today and was on page 6, checking out the readers responses. The first one jumped out at me called "Dutch Sweet". This man in Lockport, Ill. (I won't put his name here since I don't know him but you can look in the magazine!) responded back with two websites covering Groningen and Friesland provinces which have SCANNED images of the ledgers recording birth, marriages and deaths! I was so excited! I went to the Friesland site, www.allefriezen.nl, and put in my maiden name since that family came from the Friesland area. WOW! I immediately found my 3rd great grandfather, Gerben Groenhof who died in 1871. I posted the copy I downloaded above. I totally cannot believe I have never heard of these sites before! The other site is www.allegroningers.nl and I feel to overwhelmed by the one document to look for more! (Maybe I will print it out so I can drool over it :) The genealogist work is never done, especially with the greatest invention on earth, the internet!

The Time Capsule

More Saturday Night, Genealogy fun! The new assignment is to go to dMarie Time Capsule Website and look up a day that is relevant to your family tree and then share it.

I am picking May 21st, yesterday, which was my Grandmother's birthday. Gertrude Wilma (Brandt) Naber was born May 21, 1921. The picture posted above is her as a teenager and is a personal favorite.

In 1921, the president was Warren G. Harding with V.P. Calvin Coolage. Bread cost $.10 per loaf and gas was $.26 per gallon. The top book was Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.

Union Loom - No. 36

My mother currently owns a union loom that she purchased from her former mother-in-law, Agnes Stremler Groenhof. This is the loom that my mother (hopefully) will pass along to me! As far as I know, my grandmother Agnes worked in the textile industry in Michigan and at one point purchased or received this Union Loom manufactured by the Union Loom Works in Boonville, N.Y. I don't have any memories of my grandmother working the loom but she did save a clipping from the Holland Sentinel showing her working the loom at a craft fair (which is posted above).

I do have lots of memories of my own mother working on the loom making rag rugs. I can still hear the banging when she pulled on the reed piece to tighten up the weave. My mother, and apparently my grandmother, always worked standing up since there is an extra board attached to the bottom of the loom to make it taller. (My grandmother was about 6 feet tall, as am I!)

The reason I am bring up the loom now is because my mother asked me to find a new source of warp since she hasn't purchased any in a long time and will need some more soon. So I was looking around the internet and finding out stuff about this loom and where to get warp. It looks like I am fortunate to have an original instruction manual. So at some point, I will scan this booklet and post it to this site (or link to its location) so that anyone looking for a copy can get what they need.

Fresh Start Tree

A "Fresh Start Tree" is starting a new family file with sourcing for EVERY person and event. And, yes, I have contemplated doing this for a long time because I really want to have a clean tree. Today Genea-Musings posted discussing the problems with his tree and how he doesn't really want to start fresh. But he comments about another blogger, Amy Coffin, who did start over. So I went to her blog. (Turns out she is a Librarian also!) She started fresh with a new genealogy software program and went from there.

I really think that my work with Bento will make sourcing a lot easier, if or when I start fresh. I could start right now but I don't have a new genealogy program to use yet. My current program, which I love, is iFamily for Leopard but there isn't going to be any updates unless the program is sold to someone else. It has been over a year and there has been nothing new. But Dick Eastman blogged about a new program called Branches. He was very impressed with it after giving it a test go which makes me excited! But the downside is that there is only a Windows version available. At least there is talk about a Mac version unlike Roots Magic which I would love to use, if I could use it on Mac without running Windows. I don't want to pollute me Mac :)

A missing wedding picture

Many years ago, I created a wedding (or at least a picture of the couple around that time) genealogy picture album. The idea was that it would start with me and my husband and then go to our parents, our grandparents and out to our great-grandparents. (I don't have any pictures of the next level so I never even put those pages in the book.) As of yesterday, I was missing 3 pictures for the album, 2 from my husbands side and 1 from my own. Well, I was picking some stuff up yesterday and I found some pictures. Of course I have to scan them but I thought I would take a look before I put them on the scan pile. Well, I found a picture of my mother-in-law, who passed away a few years ago along with one of the missing pictures with a note from her! I actually had this picture for a number of years but totally forgot. WOW! I am very excited! The copy is not great but I fixed it up a bit and it is posted above. This is Duncan Livingston & Ida May Cook married in 1901.

My daughter loves this album as much as I do so I showed her the picture and she noticed something interesting. (Figures!) If you look closely at the broach Ida is wearing, it looks like a picture of her husband. I will have to see if my father in law has the original at his house since the orientation of the photo is wrong for the album and I would like to rescan it.

So the only pictures I need are Edwin Charles Vorce & Susie Augusta Stinchfield, married in 1895 AND Ben Stremler & Lucy De Vries married in 1908. Of course it might not be a wedding picture but I would like something for the album!

Matrilineal Line

I haven't done a Genea-Musings Saturday Night Challenge in a while so here it goes! This one is to post your matrilineal line, your family tree traced back through your mother and then to her mother, etc. The second part of the challenge is related to testing of the DNA which I haven't done so I am skipping that!

My Matrilineal Line:
1) Elizabeth Ann
2) Janice Elaine Naber
3) Gertrude Wilma Brandt (1921-2003) married Gordon Naber
4) Jeanette DeVries (1899-1975) married Otto Brandt
5) Gertrude Boes (1866-1936) married Johannes De Vries
6) Hermina Beld ( 1936-1920) married Egbert Boes
7) Jantje Bekker (1805-1893) married Jan Beld

My Husband's Matrilineal LIne:

1) Eric Nelson

2) Leah Grace Vorce (1941-2006) married Nelson Green

3) Grace Vea Tillotson (1901-1976) married Harold Vorce

4) Nellie May Burnett (1864-1951) married Asahel Tillotson

5) Sarah Jane Case (1840-1915) married Charles Burnett

6) Phebe Bagley (1798-1874) married Ira Case

7) Sarah (??-??) married Ichabod Bagley

PS) the picture is my mother-in-law with her only granddaughter, my beautiful daughter, Claire!

Online backup Update

I signed up for Mozy backup in February. It is now two months later and I have not had even ONE successful backup. I am just done with it. I am not even sure if I have successfully canceled my account since their online information doesn't even matchup with their own documentation. Despite my frustration, I will try to explain the main issue: My backup would stop without any error message. The best I could get from the support staff is that there is a connection issue. For awhile, it was their issue but even after it was fixed, it still happened. So I spent a lot of time sending emails back and forth and almost any directions given by support didn't match up with what I was able to access using their downloaded software. My suspicion is that support was using a PC while I have a Mac BUT if you offer the service for both, than provide proper support for both.

Since I still think doing an online backup is just a really smart idea, I am going to try a different service, Backblaze, which was mentioned by Eastman's genealogy blog. Right off there is one big difference. You receive a 15 day free trial, unlimited backup. So I am currently doing a backup to test out the backup process. Another plus about Backblaze is that some of their team members are former Apple employees. This gives me hope since I believe that once an Apple user, always an Apple user!

Who do you think you are?

I LOVE this show: Who do you think you are?! Now I cannot actually watch it when it is on TV since that particular channel (8) is not coming in with my little converter box. But every weekend I can watch the show on-line using Hulu.com. Yes there are commercials but it isn't to bad. I usually let the video load for a bit (by pausing) and then watch it until it hits another slow spot and pause again.

Every episode so far has been very interesting. I love the mix of history and how it wraps around the ancestors being discovered. I love the reactions of the celebrities when they discover something amazing. I love visiting the different libraries and archives, although this part is pretty small. I would like to see more of the background discovery process but they only have 40ish minutes and it has to appeal to non-genealogy people as well.

I hope that we will be able to watch the British version of this show at some point!

Online Backups

I have a lot of information and pictures stored on my laptop computer. I would be lost and devastated if I lost everything on my hard drive. More so now than ever before since I don't even have prints of the last few years of my pictures, just files on my computer. So I have a MacBook which does backups all the time. This is great! If something happened to my hard drive, all would not be lost and I could restore from my backup. But what if something happened to my house and I lost my computer and my backup? This is what has been bugging me for a while.

I listen to the Genealogy Guys podcast and they have mentioned several time that they do online backups with Mozy. So I decided I would give this service a try and signed up for a two year time frame. Mozy would backup my computer when I scheduled it and all would be good. I knew it wouldn't be a fast upload, I do have a lot of information, but I believed it would be a good backup.

But I have been having problems with the backup process. It actually takes DAYS and DAYS for a backup. The first time I ended up stopping the backup because I thought it was stuck. I started it again a few days later and it just kept on going and going. This time I was patient and waited it out, checking periodically on the status. Finally it reached 100% and I thought, "Oh Good! It's almost done!" But no, it kept right on going. It was almost up to 120% when I finally stopped it because I totally do not understand why that happened!

So I ask myself, what can I do to speed up the process? Well, the "easy" answer is to clean up my hard drive. I am not always smart about what file type I saved. I do have a lot of .tiff items. So I have been working on changing those over to .jpg which takes up less space. At least, I have been doing this for everything but my pictures. I still really want those at .tiff but maybe I need to store those on a separate hard drive and just have jpg copies on my computer. Ultimately, this is what I want to do but what a huge project!!!

Reading related to Genealogy

Sometimes I come across (or hear about) a book that relates to genealogy. The book I am reading right now qualifies. I want the author, Ingrid Hill, to write stories about my ancestors and I don't care if it is all fiction! The book is Ursula, Under. The reason I am reading this book is because the main piece of the story is set in Michigan, where I live. My library, KDL, does a winter reading program for adults and this is the last book I needed to read to complete the entire bingo page. So I really didn't know a lot about this book before I picked it up. It is actually kind of hard for me to describe but I will try.

The story centers around a little girl named Ursula who falls down a mine shaft. The story then goes back and forward through time exploring this girls ancestry. These stories are so vivid that I felt that I could go to the location described in the book and actually find the grave (or skull) of the person who has since passed from history. I haven't finished the book yet (I'm about 2/3 of the way through) and there is very little information about Ursula's current condition. But I am really enjoying the book! Read it! :)

Organization Update

So I have been working hard(ish) on my files! I have one drawer emptied out, not the smallish drawers either, a very long filing cabinet. What I ended up doing was scanning the obituaries and miscellaneous stuff and filing them by family group.

But I put the internet stuff into folders by site. I already did the Holland Sentinel archives lookups and now I am starting on the GenLias. I have a LOT of dutch ancestors (and their families) so this file is kind of full. (The largest file is actually from a site called Digital Resources of the Netherlands but now I am wondering if I can just use GenLias instead.) Right now I am questioning the dates that are listed since they are labeled Registered. I wonder if the date is actually the event date or the day the event was recorded. Since I haven't been able to find the answer, I am plowing forward with inputting this information into my Bento file and linking to each person.

I do consider the information a primary source since it was recorded at the time of the event. Although I am bothered that the information I am looking at isn't a scanned image but transcribed which does leave room for error. Since I will probably never be able to actually see the documents, I will just have to work with what I have available!

Update

So I was listening to the Genealogy Guys and George mentioned that his New Years resolution was to organize his paper files. Which he did. Now I have been working on organizing computer stuff into Bento but my paper files are so not well organized. Or I should say, they are in folders but I really do not have any idea what I have. So I not only need to reorganize the papers so that I know what I have, I also need to scan and update my Bento file so that they are linked to each person. So I decide to start redoing my files. I have been pulling all the files apart and adding to Bento. I did find I have a lot of stuff I printed off the internet so that means I need to go back and digitally link to my computer rather than all the paper. Serious amount of work.

But I did add some obituaries to my files and this is one of the ones I found. This is the woman in the picture from the last posting I did!