Serendipity Day !

Blurb in our daily paper explained that Spokane has been visited by a dozen U.S. presidents plus some VPs, wives and others. Our list is Taft, Harding, both Roosevelts, Truman, Carter, Nixon, Clinton, Reagan, Ford and GW Bush. How about your town? How many presidential visits do you mark?

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Cemeteries have always been of great interest to family historians. It’s always interesting to me to read about cemeteries of yore and of other cultures. In December 1634, three men set out from Fort Orange (now Albany) New York to make contact with the Mohawks to convince them that the Dutch made better trades than the French or English. They visited a series of villages, “surprising Harmen with their level of civilization. They encountered cemeteries, surrounded by palisades, ‘so neatly made that it was a wonder,’ and graves painted red, white and black. A chief’s tomb they found was large enough to have an entrance and was decorated with carvings and paintings of animals.” (From The Island at the Center of the World: Epic Story of Dutch in Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, by Russell Shorto, 2005.)

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Another newspaper article spelled out the “Eight Critical Skills” or attributes that teens need to become well-functioning adults. As I read it, seemed to me that even we adults could tune up our skills in these areas, especially as genealogists:

·         Problem-solving skills

·         Critical thinking

·         Emotional intelligence (“a greater predictor of success in life than IQ”)

·         Values and ethics

·         Resourcefulness and resilience

·         Creative processing

·         Executive functioning, including basic social skills

·         Leadership perspective and the ability to see the big picture

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Have you an ancestor who traveled west on the Oregon or California trails? Did you know there is a super organization dedicated to preserving not only the records of those travels but the physical trail (the ruts) itself? The Oregon-California Trails Association (OCTA) is headquarter in Independence, Missouri, and holds annual conferences somewhere along the trail. This year, 2016, it will be in Fort Hall, Idaho (near Pocatello) from 1-5 August. At these conferences (which are vastly different from genealogy conferences) there are few vendors (mostly books) and the emphasis is on scholarship and education. And the theme of each conference centers on that area, the geology, the Native Americans, the trail itself. Click to www.OCTA-trails.org for more information.

The OCTA website also offers Paper Trails, a database of information about every single traveler on any of the overland trails as they are found and documented. So there is a second reason to check out OCTA.

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Several times I’ve taught a class titled, “Is There A Book With My Family In It?” The idea being that there are at least a dozen ways to check to see if there is a book written about your family. Carol Richey, in her article “Reminiscences” in the April-May 2016 issue of Internet Genealogy goes a step further. When you can’t find a book about your ancestors, nor family letters, diaries, journals or other personal accounts, turn to county or compiled local histories! “These town and county histories began to emerge in the 1870s, in a large part a result of the congressional resolution in 1876 recommending towns and counties compiled historical sketches for the nation’s centennial anniversary,” states Richey. She cites finally finding a biographical sketch of her ancestor in the Compendium of History, Reminiscence, and Biography of Nebraska, published in 1912.

I think we have all been aware of these county histories but have also been aware that too often they were not indexed, nor were they even in alphabetical order. Found online, that problem is solved for then these books and their contents are word-searchable.

So where to find these books? Online collections of state libraries, university archives, and the online collection of state and local historical societies. Also do check out http://books.familysearch.org and http://archive.org or www.hathitrust.org. These websites might also point you to “your” book.

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Back to the topic of cemeteries, one of my favorite cemeteries is Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. So named because holly used to grow profusely on the grounds, this cemetery sold its first grave in 1849.  Hollywood Cemetery ranks as the second most-visited cemetery in the nation, right behind Arlington National Cemetery. Paths and driving roads meander through the 130 acres where you can visit the graves of several U.S. presidents.

From their website, www.hollywoodcemetery.org you can click on Genealogy and then search their online burial records. Or their database of Confederate soldier burial records.  Note of interest… there is a large Confederate burial area that, to be frank, is not well marked. This is because the Confederate dead from the Gettysburg battle (July 1863) were brought to Hollywood as their resting place. Can you imagine hauling hundreds of bodies 185 miles in the July heat????

Hollywood Cemetery is one place I must visit whenever I’m blessed enough to visit Richmond, Virginia.

Serendipity Day, Friday, 12 Feb 2016

Hello again from a soggy, sunless Spokane.....but daffodils are up! Glad to share some serendipity today with you all..................  Donna

This is a most intriguing announcement from Microsoft:

Microsoft introduced a new app on Thursday that anyone with a dog should play with because it's a lot of fun.

It's called Fetch!, and it's available for iPhones and on the web. It uses artificial intelligence techniques to classify images of real-world dogs into breeds. On the web, users can upload a photo of a dog, or you can take a picture of your pet using your phone's camera.

If you upload a picture of, say, a Rhodesian ridgeback, Microsoft should be able to confirm the dog's breed.

It's the latest in a line of fun, silly apps released by Microsoft Garage, an "outlet for experimental projects" that are designed to show off creative and unexpected ways to apply Microsoft's expertise in artificial intelligence. In the past year, Microsoft has released apps that detect and measures mustaches in photos or guesses your age, for example.

Like Microsoft's other AI apps, Fetch! should become more accurate as users upload more photos and data. More technical information is available here.

Fetch! is already fairly accurate. Here it identified the breed of a dog belonging to one of BI's reporters.

Wouldn’t it be fun to upload a photo of the dog in an ancestral photo to see what kind of dog they had? Probably a “Heinz 57” more often than not, but I think I’ll try this out!

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I have recently become aware of a genealogical deficiency of mine…. Not uploading stories, photos and documentation for my ancestors. So I recently created a tree on MyHeritage and titled it “Oswald Descendants 1911.”  John Peter Oswald and Mary Ethel Leverich were married in 1911, had five children and now a score of grandchildren. I set up this private website as a forum where any and all members of this family could post about their newest additions and learn more about their cousins.  But I do plan to post more about John Peter and Mary Ethel.

Now to the point of this blurb. I asked my sis-in-law to write up the story of her mom, Esther Mary,  (and my children’s great-grandmother) for this MyHeritage tree. She replied, “Mother did that herself…… didn’t I send it to you?” I replied in the negative and she rooted around, found it and sent it to me. Esther finished her autobiography just four years before she died. And I never knew about it! Sharon only THOUGHT she’d shared it with me!

Apply this to your own situation. How many family biographies for your family are out there and you have never asked about them???????

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This next is too wonderful not to share……….a real story of lost and found after considerable effort. This was a thank you letter from Susan M. after I reunited her with a postcard of a building her grandfather designed:

“Dear Donna, Oh, thank you for sending the postcard!  My great-grandfather and his partner were the two who designed Thompson Hall (on the WSU campus). It has gone through a couple of renovations over the years but the exterior look as original.

The story of how I found you (and the postcard) was so interesting:

Since I had not spent much time research this great-grandfather in several years, I decided to see what new details I might find online. I did the usual and Googled various word combinations and came across an article in the summer 2014 issue of the WSGS (Washington State Gen Soc) blog. In it was a submission by someone who said they found the postcard of 1903 postcard. The blog author said that she found the postcard at an estate sale while recently visiting Virginia, of all places. I immediately recognized the building and so set about to local the person who submitted the article. I thought the submitter was Susan Davis Faulkner so I asked Sue Erickson of our Yakima Valley Genealogy Society if they knew how to find her. I phoned her and found out she was in the middle of a move. I offered to give her six months to get settled and I’d call back. Later the story I gave her about the article didn’t ring bells; and in fact she had never been to Virginia so I was on the wrong track. I looked up the mention again and found Charles Hansen’s name attached. I looked up his phone number online and called. He was not the one who had the postcard but he believed it was Donna Phillips as she had been in Virginia about the time in question. He was kind enough to get in touch with his good friend, Donna, and had her call me. So after about eight months I found the right person! Donna was kind enough to give up her claim to the postcard that meant so much to me, and she sent it to me. Long story, but true. It pays to persevere. Note: postage required on that 1903 postcard was one penny. I hope this gives you food for the newsletter and hope others can find this treasure hunting experience helpful in their searches.  Again thank you, Susan M.

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Follow-up report from RootsTech:  James Tanner, author of Genealogy’s Star blog and a very reputable and knowlegeable genealogist of many facets explained this in a blog post just prior to the RootsTech event:  “Unless you live in a cave all by yourself, you can hardly be unaware of the progress of digitalization…. In genealogy, the changes with the most impact involve the growth on online databases with billions upon billions of digitized records….. With very few exceptions, today I can do more than 90% of the research I did over the space of 15 or 20 years, in a few hours over a few weeks online….(it’s wonderful) that today many people can make significant progress in discovering their family in a much shorter period of time by working online.”

And James Tanner’s point? Use your computer, smart phone, tablet or iPad to the fullest when doing your genealogy. As the Ancestry ads quipped a sort time ago, “You don’t need to know where to look, you just need to look!”

There is no good reason not to post, search for, or start your family tree online for the most wonderful of reasons:  to connect with cousins and to find more family facts. 

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For some warm-funnies to end with, these images were taken at the Eastern Washington Branch of the Washington State Digital Archives, Cheney, Washington. Spotting the Register of Prisoners books on the shelf, I had to have a looksee. I was intrigued both by seeing that these bad boys (ca 1900) had come to Spokane from all over the world, and second that their offense was so benign by today’s standards!