Monday, August 30, 2010

Amanuensis Monday: Ben Cruvant in Jefferson City

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

This week I transcribe two newspaper articles, in which appear the name of Ben Cruvant, a brother to my great grandmother, Bertha Cruvant.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks --August 22 to August 26
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

I am posting this on Friday as I know I will be away from the internet for most of the weekend, and I'm not sure how much time on Sunday I will have.  Next week's will cover the two days missed this week.
  • Every year Beloit College creates its Mindset List. They list items the incoming class of college Freshmen know about, and don't know about.  Are you ready to feel old?  
A couple entries from the Mindset List which may be of genealogical interest:

10. Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren't afraid of immigration...unless it involves "real" aliens from another planet.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

Press Releases
(In some cases multiple blogs have posted these press releases, but I have chosen one representative.)
Blogging/Social Networking/Technology





Other Weekly Lists
The genealogy bloggers below provide their selections for the week - many different from my own. 
Amanuensis Monday: August 23rd participants
[Amanuensis Monday is a weekly blogging theme I began in February of 2009, where participants transcribe letters, audio, and other documents.  Why I do this.]
If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Amanuensis Monday: H.S. Feinstein and the 1920 Election Inquiry

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

This week I look at a few newspaper articles pertaining to St. Louis election fraud in 1920 - and a case that went to the State Supreme Court.  In 1920, the ballot boxes, tally sheets, and poll books were subpoenaed during an election inquiry.  An election judge, named H.S. Feinstein, objected - arguing that the subpoenas violated the secrecy of the ballot.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

The Unusual Nature of the Letter

It appears my maternal grandmother, Myrtle, kept every letter my grandfather, Martin, sent home during the war, and preserved them in their original envelopes inside a shoebox.

Martin didn’t save every letter Myrtle sent him. Realities of war probably prevented that. He moved around from base to base, and there wasn’t a lot of room for personal belongings. But I suspect all the letters that he did bring home with him ended up being preserved with everything else the two of them saved.

Myrtle also saved a large number of letters her father sent her during the latter half of the 1920s. He wrote her weekly, and the letters indicate she wrote him weekly as well. Though we don’t have any of the letters she wrote to him.

On the other hand, Martin’s mother, Helen, saved many of the letters Martin and Myrtle sent her. And when she passed, those letters were discovered and preserved by my grandfather.

***

A recent conversation brought to mind the unusual nature of the letter. It is one of the few mediums where it is rare that the author maintains a copy of his/her work.

I am addicted to writing. Blog posts, poetry, fiction, emails. For all of these, I have preserved electronic copies of that which I consider important. However, this isn’t the case with the letters I have written.

I have had a computer since the mid-1980s, and there are a handful of letters I’ve written that were saved, and somehow made it through multiple hard drive crashes. (some were sent, some unsent). However, other letters didn’t get preserved. At least, not by me. And I wonder if the recipient still has a copy. 

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks --August 15 to August 21
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

Cynthia at ChicagoGenealogy shows how to use birth registers to find birth certificates that aren't appearing in the results for searches at FamilySearch.  She has a similar post for the Chicago Death Records.  Just because you can't find something in a database, doesn't mean it isn't there.  Sometimes the handwriting on documents is poor, making the job of the indexer quite difficult, and that of the researcher even more so.

NARAtions (the National Archives blog) illustrates how you can distinguish US Citizens on passenger manifests.

Tamura Jones at Modern Software Experience presents two different definitions of genealogy in conflict with each other - the legal and the biological.  He expands upon this in A Framework for Classical Genealogy.

James Tanner at Genealogy's Star discusses What You May or May Not Find in Court Documents for Genealogy.

Donna Pointkouski at What's Past is Prologue reminds us in her post about A Killer Chair that family photographs often contain more than just the people.

J.M. of Tracing My Roots has found a number-code in some letters from the 1920s-1940s she has been unable to decipher.

Gena Philibert Ortega at the World Vital Records blog describes 5 ways to document a death.

According to The Korea Times there's a new Korean genealogy database.  (Hat/Tip: GenealogyBlog)

The Daily Digi shares some resources on family history scrapbooking

Several bloggers are at the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference in Knoxville, TN and have been blogging about it.  Geneabloggers has a list.

The Jewish Museum of Maryland shares a fun video on why they love the archives - along with the inspiration leading up to the video, including an advertisement for the Discovery Channel that went viral, and an XKCD comic.

Blogging/Social Networking

Thomas MacEntee at Geneabloggers reminds us why we need a blogging disclosure statement.

Julie Cahill Tarr at GenBlog shows how to create a table of contents for your blog

Users of Facebook may be interested in reading the ACLU's guide to protecting your privacy with respect to Facebook's new Places feature. 

Other Weekly Lists
The genealogy bloggers below provide their selections for the week - many different from my own.
Amanuensis Monday: August 16th participants
[Amanuensis Monday is a weekly blogging theme I began in February of 2009, where participants transcribe letters, audio, and other documents.  Why I do this.]

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings
Anonymous at Nolichucky Roots
Heather Wilkinson Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
Lisa Wallen Logsdon at Old Stones Undeciphered
Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee
RootsResearcher at So That's Where I Get it From
Deborah Andrew at The Sum of All My Research
J.M. at Tracing my Roots 
John Newmark at Transylvanian Dutch
Kevin Walker at Who We Were, Are & Will Be Our Family

If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Tuesday Tech Tip: Google's "Site:" command is not always better

Kerry Scott over at the Clue Wagon discusses Google's site search function.
  1. Go to the Google homepage.
  2. Type in site:[name of site] [keywords] For example, if you wanted to search for mentions of Glenbeulah on this site, you’d type in site:cluewagon.com Glenbeulah.
As she points out, this can be a very useful function for searching websites that don't have a search function.  However, she concludes:
I almost never use a site’s native search box, because I prefer the consistent results of doing it this way.
Be careful.  Google doesn't index every page of every website.  And the pages it indexes, it doesn't always capture every word.  In many cases, if a blog or website provides a native search function, it will actually yield more results than Google will.

Below are the Google results searching my non-genealogy blog for the word 'Napoleon'.  It yields 8 results.
Here are the results if you use the Wordpress search box on the blog.  There are 9 results.  The entry Google missed contains the word 'Napoleonic.'  That's only part of the reason Google missed it.
Two identical searches, conducted about 3 minutes apart, with different results.  So Google's results aren't even consistent.  However, even if it were consistent, Wordpress's ability to find different word-endings of the same word makes it a superior method.


What about for this blog? 
Here I use Blogger, which is owned and operated by Google.  Does this make a difference?

When I use Blogger's search function on this blog, and search for Horton, I get 17 results.

Google gives me 68 results.  This at first glance seems a marked improvement.  However, the word "Horton" appears on my blog's sidebar, and Google's search function can't tell the difference between the sidebar and the blog entry.  Theoretically, Google should return all 925 entries as hits, if it counts the sidebar.  Not counting the entries in the results that only appear there because of the sidebar, I think there are 11 results.  I don't feel like spending the time figuring out which entries it missed, but I'm pretty sure it did miss some.  And the extra chaff it provides makes it more difficult to find the wheat.

What about using the site: command at Google's blogsearch?

This provides interesting results.  Blogsearch finds all 17 entries for Horton (and only these 17 entries.)  Google's Blogsearch understands the difference between sidebar and entry, while Google's main search site doesn't.  And (maybe) because Blogger is a Google product, they've indexed Blogger blogs better.

My search for Napoleon at Blogsearch yields only two results.


This isn't an adequate study, but I think I might avoid using blogsearch for non-blogger blogs.

Blogger and Wordpress blogs make up a sizable number of the blogs out there, and I am quite happy with the results their database search functions yield.  Google's results are inconsistent, and incomplete. But if you are at a site that doesn't have a search function, Google's sitesearch command is useful to remember.  It's better than nothing.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Amanuensis Monday: Myrtle V Ridgely and the US Post Office

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

A few weeks ago I transcribed the severance papers and letters of recommendation documenting the move of my grandmother, Myrtle Van Every, from the El Paso, Texas QuarterMaster Corps to the St. Louis, Missouri Post Office.  She worked at the post office from November 20, 1920 until May 17, 1927.  And then she resigned, as she was getting married. This marriage to Dale Ridgely lasted three months. So she returned to the Post Office.  But they refused to give her back her old job at her old salary, and forced her to start again as a junior substitute clerk.  She fought hard, and tried to pull every string she could:

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks --August 8 to August 14
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

This week, the Geneablogging community lost one of its own.  Terry Thornton of the Hill Country of Monroe County, MS and Hill Country H.O.G.S. Webbpress blogs, and founder of the Association of Graveyard Rabbits, passed away on August 9, 2010.

Many have been posting memories and tributes.  Below are a few of them:
Most of us only knew him through the words he wrote, but those words were inspirational to many.  He was constantly encouraging others to share their stories. When he created the H.O.G.S. blog concept back in 2007, I joined up with a few modifications, and declared myself G.H.O.T.I. (pronounced 'fish.') My heartfelt condolences to his family and friends - online and off.


Other Weekly Lists
The genealogy bloggers below provide their selections for the week - many different from my own.
Amanuensis Monday: August 9th participants
[Amanuensis Monday is a weekly blogging theme I began in February of 2009, where participants transcribe letters, audio, and other documents.  Why I do this.]

Apple at Apple's Tree
Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings
Ginger Smith at Genealogy by Ginger 
Leah at The Internet Genealogist
Barbara Poole at Life from the Roots
Anonymous at Nolichucky Roots
Heather Wilkinson Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
Lisa Wallen Logsdon at Old Stones Undeciphered
Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee (2 entries)
RootsResearcher at So That's Where I Get it From
John Newmark at Transylvanian Dutch
Kevin Walker at Who We Were, Are & Will Be Our Family

If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Amanuensis Monday: Interview with Melvin Lester Newmark - Conclusion

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

This week I conclude transcribing an interview of my paternal grandfather, Melvin Lester Newmark, conducted on December 23, 1987, by a personal historian.  A good portion of the final fifteen minutes has been edited out below either because I was unable to understand what was on the tape, or it directly mentions a living person.  These portions have been indicated by: [...]

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks --August 1 to August 7
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere
  • James Tanner at Genealogy's Star discusses Notes and Note Taking, and how he made it through law school without being good at taking notes, and what he is now doing as a genealogist to counter this deficiency.
  • Carol at Reflections from the Fence also discusses how death certificates can have errors in them, with a personal narrative about her mother-in-law's recent passing.
    Press Releases
    These may appear at multiple sites, but I have chosen one representation.
    Carnivals
    Social Networking
    Other Weekly (and monthly) Lists
    The genealogy bloggers below provide their selections for the week - many different from my own.
    Amanuensis Monday: August 2nd participants
    [Amanuensis Monday is a weekly blogging theme I began in February of 2009, where participants transcribe letters, audio, and other documents.  Why I do this.]

    Valerie C at Begin with Craft
    Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings
    Ginger Smith at Genealogy by Ginger
    Heather Wilkinson Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
    Lisa Wallen Logsdon at Old Stones Undeciphered
    Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee 
    Chris Staats at Staats' Place
    John Newmark at Transylvanian Dutch

    If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.

    Pet Peeves

    Since I know more people read this weekly post than any other post on my blog, and since I see this error often, and saw it again just this weekend in some submission guidelines for a poetry competition, I am going to remind all my readers:

    Copywrite and Copyright are both English words.  However, they have different meanings.

    Copywriting is the process of creating copy to promote a person, place, or business - often copywriters are hired by companies for advertising, marketing, public relations, etc.  Copywriters write for a living, hence the word 'write' is found within the job title.

    Copyright refers to the rights granted to the creator or author of a work (or assigned to someone else).  It has nothing to do with writing since copyright can refer to photographs, artwork, recordings, etc.  It has to do with legal rights.  That's how you tell the difference.

    When someone uses the wrong spelling, I assume they don't know the meaning of the word, for if they did, they wouldn't get confused.

    Monday, August 2, 2010

    Amanuensis Monday: Interview with Melvin Lester Newmark - Part 8

    Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

    I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

    This week I continue transcribing an interview of my paternal grandfather, Melvin Lester Newmark, conducted in 1987 by a personal historian. My grandfather is discussing starting his own law practice in approximately 1938.

    Sunday, August 1, 2010

    Weekly Genealogy Picks

    Weekly Genealogy Picks --July 25 to July 31
    from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

    Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings, posted some information about his Horton descent.  JT at filioagnostic commented and posted some additional information.  If JT is correct, I am cousin to both of them through a Joseph Horton (1572-1640), father of Barnabas Horton.

    Michael deGroot, in The Mormon Times, wrote about the coming genealogical dark ages. There have been many responses in the geneablogging community.  (See my post yesterday.)

    Schelly Talalay Dardashti at MyHeritage Genealogy Blog suggests: Make Someone Happy, Talk Tradition.  She has learned, as a journalist, that starting a conversation with family history, even when the interview isn't about family history, is a great ice-breaker.  At Tracing the Tribe, Schelly discusses DNA and the recent FDA hearings.

    Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee has written several posts this week about his application to become a Certified Genealogist, and their rejection of said application: C.G. Application; Why I applied; Acknowledgements; What I Did Wrong; Why I Won't Apply Again; Aftermath. His detailed account of where he went wrong in his application could be of great assistance to someone else going through the process.

    James Tanner at Genealogy's Star asks Are there limits to genealogical research? -- addressing those who claim to have researched their ancestors "back to Adam."

    Linda Hall-Little at Passage to the Past shares some suggestions on finding living relatives after the 1930 census.

    Lindsay at Genealogy Insider asks Is Lindsay the Intern a Mayflower Descendant?  She details some research she has done on that question.

    Lynn Palermo at The Armchair Genealogist shares some pros and cons of Private vs Public Family Trees.

    Dan Curtis shares 15 movies of interest to Personal Historians
     
    Senator Claire McCaskill (MO) believes that between 4900-6000 graves at Arlington National Cemetery may be unmarked or misidentified on cemetery maps.  This estimate far exceeds a prior Army estimate of 211.

    And while not genealogically related:

    Kyle Komarnitsky shares an amazing video of a hummingbird feeding its babies. (hat/tip: Craig Newmark, who, to my knowledge, isn't related to me. )

    Other Weekly Lists
    The genealogy bloggers below provide their selections for the week - many different from my own.
    Amanuensis Monday: July 26th participants
    [Amanuensis Monday is a weekly blogging theme I began in February of 2009, where participants transcribe letters, audio, and other documents.  Why I do this.]

    Valerie C at Begin with Craft
    "anonymous" at filioagnostic
    Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings
    "anonymous" at Nolichucky Roots 
    Heather Wilkinson Rojo at Nutfield Genealogy
    Lisa Wallen Logsdon at Old Stones Undeciphered
    Martin Hollick at The Slovak Yankee 
    John Newmark at Transylvanian Dutch
    Bill West at West in New England

    If you participated, but don't appear on this list, please, let me know.