The CoG has been posted

The 89th Carnival of Genealogy has been posted. 18 poets wrote odes to their family history.

The topic for the next edition (#90!) of the COG will be: The Third Annual iGene Awards, The Best of The Best! It's Academy awards time... time for the Academy of Genealogy and Family History, aka AGFH, to honor their best blog posts of 2009 in the following 5 categories:

• Best Picture - Best old family photo that appeared on your blog in 2009. Tell us which you liked best and why.
• Best Screen Play - Which family story that you shared in 2009 would make the best movie? Who would you cast as your family members?
• Best Documentary - Which was the best informational article you wrote about a place, thing, or event involving your family's history in 2009?
• Best Biography - Which was the best biographical article you wrote in 2009?
• Best Comedy - Which was the best funny story, poem, joke, photo, or video that you shared on your blog in 2009?

More information here

Wordless Wednesday: Same Person?

The man on the right had no brothers.

Here is an image of his only son
So...the younger man on the left...

click on image to enlarge
move cursor over image for more details

Let it gleam or let it glimmer...

One day, in the course of that winter, the sun had come out for a while in the afternoon, but it was the second of February, that ancient Candlmas-day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of six weeks of cold, inspired Matthew Laensberg with the two lines, which have deservedly become classic:

Let it gleam or let it glimmer 
The bear returns into his cave.

(Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862, p. 730)

Bears and groundhogs are both hibernating animals.  I suspect it's a little safer to use groundhogs as official prognosticators.

THE LIEGE ALMANAC

The celebrated almanac of "Francis Moore, physician," to whose predictions thousands are accustomed to look with implicit confidence and veneration, is rivalled, on the continent, by the almanac of Liege, by "Matthew Laensberg," who there enjoys an equal degree of celebrity.

Whether the name of Laensberg is a real or an assumed паme is a matter of great doubt...The earliest of these almanacs known to exist is of the year 1636. It bears the name of Matthew Lansbert, mathematician, and not Laensberg, as it is now written.

-- The Table Book, W. Tegg, 1827, p. 138

Some feel it is cruel, and potentially dangerous, to wake up groundhogs.

While waking groundhogs from their hibernation has become a major tradition on Feb. 2, such efforts can actually put the animals' lives at risk...If a groundhog is awakened from hibernation too early, it might not have the energy to find food and survive in cold winter temperatures.

The St. Louis Zoo doesn't participate, but it's not due to groundhog health issues.

"The fact that we're not having a Groundhog Day celebration is not really a stand we're taking so much as it is that we have a really cranky groundhog who doesn't like to be woken up," St. Louis Zoo public relations director Janet Powell told the Tribune.

 More on the Candlemas origins of the holiday.

Tombstone Tuesday: Mandell Newmark (1923-1945)

Killed in Action World War II
Mandell Newmark
Tec 5, 163 Inf, 41st Div
Jan 31, 1923
April 15, 1945

My Great Uncle, Mandell Newmark, was born on Jan 31, 1923, the youngest son of Barney and Bertha (Cruvant) Newmark. He was named after his great grandfather, Mandell Mojsabovski. He was killed in Action on April 15, 1945. He is buried at United Hebrew Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

In the past, I have shared several photographs of him, along with some transcriptions from his war diary.

Amanuensis Monday: Grammar School, and Child Labor

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.

I'm nearing the end of a transcription of a tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, his older brother, Ted, and their sister, Berta (Deutsch) Freed recorded in 1977. I'm 2 hours into the tape, and at this point they're recalling grammar school in Hungary and in Chicago, as well as odd jobs they did to earn money.  (I think Berta is still in the room, even though she doesn't contribute to the conversation.)

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks -- January 24 to January 30
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

James Tanner at Genealogy's Star writes about The Future of FamilySearch

In Lithuania: View your shtetl from the air and Lithuania: Joining a SIG is a good idea! Schelly Talalay Dardashti at Tracing the Tribe discusses two resources for researching Lithuanian roots.

At The Genealogue Chris Dunham corrects the New York Times on the birthplace of J.D Salinger's mother. (Iowa, not Scotland.)

Apple at Apple's Tree discovers a revolutionary war pension application of a possible relative at Footnote.com, and upon looking at it, realizes it doesn't match a transcription she had read in a 1918 genealogy. Finding the original pays off.

At Nordic Blue Chery Kinnick continues and concludes The Best Laid Genealogical Plans - the story of her search for her birth father.

NBC has released a preview of the upcoming series, Who Do You Think You Are

MA newly elected Senator, Scott Brown, is related to President Obama. (10th cousins. I'm 9th cousins with John Kerry, and 7th cousins with William Holden and Patrick Swayze, so I'm not too impressed.)

George Stephanopoulos may be (very) distantly related to Hillary Clinton - though the potential linkage appears to be 'deduced' from a genetic trait discovered in a DNA test Stephanopoulos took, but which Clinton hasn't taken. 'Genealogists believe Clinton shares' the trait, but the news story doesn't indicate why they believe this. It sounds very fuzzy to me.

Egypt has set a date to announce the DNA results for King Tut

The related discussion of writing memoirs has been brought up in the past by some genea-bloggers. 91 year-old science fiction author, Frederik Pohl, has been writing and posting updates to his memoir at The Way the Future Blogs. Recently, he discussed how he met Isaac Asimov. (The post includes a photograph of a cleanshaven Asimov from the 1930s.)

Yesterday, January 30, was the Jewish holiday of Tu B'shevat. Sometimes referred to as New Year of the Trees, or Jewish Arbor Day.

For other weekly lists visit:

• Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs at Genea-Musings
• Apple's Weekly Rewind at Apple's Tree
• Diane Haddad's Genealogy News Corral at Genealogy Insider

Ode to Sarah Hartley Denyer Foster (1836-1898)

It's time for the 89th Carnival of Genealogy: Ode to My Family's History - Where we were challenged to compose a poem appropriate 'as an introduction for a book or video on your family history.'

Poetry is one of my passions, and I've posted a lot of poetry on this blog -- my own and others. Below are a few that pertain directly to my family history:

• Ida (Denyer) Green wrote the poem Mother, about Zerelda Ann (Singleton) Denyer. Ida's father was the brother of my second great grandfather, Ebenezer Denyer. Ida spent some time living with her Uncle Ebenezer and Aunt Sarah (Hartley) Denyer after both her parents had died.

• My maternal grandmother's sister, Willa Van Every, also wrote a poem called Mother, about my great grandmother, Margaret (Denyer) Van Every, and Willa also mentions several of her siblings.

• I wrote Where I'm From - based on George Ella Lyon's Copy-Change template of the same name.

I've also written:

• E Pluribus Unum; Cognatus, Ergo Sum
• A Toast to the First and the Fourth of July
• Divergent Yet Intersecting
• And a few fun limericks, though none of them are specifically about my family history.

As soon as I heard the carnival theme, I knew I had to participate, even though any family history collections are likely a few years away from being written. I still have a lot of research to do. While I composed two odes, I am only going to share one of them. The other I am going to put aside for reasons of my own.

Ode to Sarah Hartley Denyer Foster (1836-1898)

she could tree a rabbit
catch a mess of fish
and raise a garden.

A granddaughter's description
of our shared ancestress,
a self-proclaimed Choctaw.

She married the son
of an itinerant minister
as the nation moved towards war.

Let's see if we too
can tree a few rabbits
as we pursue

the details of her life
and the lives of the children
she raised on her garden.

©2010 John C Newmark

Credits: Carnival Poster by footnoteMaven

Minnie Van Every and the Happyhammers

Randy at Genea-Musings talks about his Forest Gump Method of Genealogy Research:

Genealogy research is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to find, but you have to look everywhere your 'genealogy gem' might be hiding

He wrote about searching the newspapers at the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America. (Containing newspapers from 1880-1922 in Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington.)

I hadn’t searched it before, and I agree with the method, so I followed the link.

First I searched in Missouri for some paternal surnames, without any success. (None of the newspapers are from the St. Louis area.)

Then I went south to Texas and searched for some maternal surnames, and hit a jackpot of Happyhammers.

What’s a Happyhammer?

“The Happyhammers are the young people...who read the Youth’s Department of The Houston Post. There are no fees or charges of any kind connected with the club. Boys and girls who read The Post may be enrolled as active members by sending name, age, and address.


It is the object of all Happyhammers to hammer happiness when and wherever possible.” Hence the club name and motto.

My maternal great aunt, Minnie Van Every wrote almost a dozen letters that were published between 1897 and 1901, between the age of 13 and 17. (The final one was cosigned by her younger sister, Willa)

The letters are great fun to read, and show she was receiving a solid education in the Texas schools of that time.

There was even a tidbit of genealogical interest to record, as each letter indicated the town from which she wrote. Most of the letters came from Maxwell, Texas, where I knew my grandmother was born in 1900. However, a couple letters in 1898 came from Ganado, Texas, which is a good 100 miles Southeast of Maxwell. I didn't know the Van Every family had spent some time there. It was very brief though, since the 1897 letters were from Maxwell, too. It's even possible she was writing from there, but not living there. (Maybe visiting relatives.)

My Problems with The Full Wiki

James Tanner at Genealogy's Star discusses a new website, The Full Wiki on this entry and this one.

I commented on the first entry explaining a few criticisms I had about the website, and I don't think I made myself clear, so I decided to provide some more details, as I agree that the website does look intriguing.  But underneath, there are some serious issues.

The Full Wiki proclaims (at the bottom of their main page):

We are building the largest collection of free licensed work on the internet. We have already brought together the collective works of Wikipedia, Wikiquote, WikiTravell, Wiktionary and for nostalgia, the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911.

So The Full Wiki basically provides you a search engine to search these five websites together.  Why not go to each website separately?  Well...it does seem to be easier to go to one than to five --- and one assumes they will add more.  (WikiSource seems a prime candidate.  At least I was surprised not to see it on the list.)

But at The Full Wiki you're not really searching those websites.  You're going back in time and searching those websites an unidentified number of days ago.  Let me show you exactly how I know this.

I am not only obsessed with Genealogy.  Perhaps my other single greatest obsession is the French author, Victor Hugo.  I love typing his name into search engines. Since I don't usually search Wikipedia and other WikiMedia sites for genealogy information, Hugo's name was the very first name I entered into The Full Wiki's search box.

Here are the results

A whole lot of results.  But it's clear I want to follow at the first link, so I do.

At first glance, you might think you're looking at the current Wikipedia page, plus a cool map of all the locations mentioned in the entry.  But you aren't.  Here's the current page.

 You'll notice Victor Hugo's full name on the current Wikipedia page is Victor-Marie Hugo.  That's his correct name.  It is NOT Victor-Mariana Clemencia Hugo, though that is what the text at The Full Wiki says.  It took a bit of research in the history section of the Wikipedia page, but that is a bit of vandalism that appeared on the entry from November 24 to December 10th of 2009.  So the snapshot of the Victor Hugo entry is somewhere between 1 month and 2 months old.

How old are the other entries?  I have no clue.  There's no way to tell on the website, as they don't tell you anywhere.  I don't blame them.  Would you tell your potential users that the content on your site -- content that is a copy of websites that are in constant change -- is over a month old?

I can not correct this error at The Full Wiki.  There is no Edit tab.  All I can do is wait for The Full Wiki to take another snapshot of the entry at Wikipedia that has been correct for over a month now.  When will this be?  Tomorrow?  A week, month, year from now?  I have no clue.  And when they take another snapshot, will that snapshot have something else wrong with it?  Maybe something that lasted only a couple seconds, but will last much longer than that at The Full Wiki.

On Wikipedia you can go to the History tab and see what the page looked like at what date.  You can find out how long information has existed on the page.  Besides source citations, this is your best clue about the accuracy of the information.  But you can't do that at The Full Wiki.  Did their robotic scripts take a picture of the entry you are researching at the wrong moment, right after someone vandalised it?  Vandalism is common on Wikipedia, but it usually lasts a relatively short time.  Minutes, maybe hours.  (It is rare for it to last as long as the vandalism on the Victor Hugo entry appears to have.)  But The Full Wiki is freezing entries in a moment of time, and that means it's freezing the vandalism too.

The Full Wiki copyright notice does provide a link to the orignal entry at the bottom of the page.

But it's not very noticeable, and nowhere does it say how old their snapshot is.  I suspect few people would assume it was over a month old.  If someone doesn't know that what they are looking at is old, they have no reason to check out the current version.


For this reason, I don't see much of an advantage to conducting most research at The Full Wiki, or supporting the concept.  Especially when you can create a Google Custom Search Engine that will search all five of these websites (and likely any other websites they add in the future)  And these search results WILL take you to the current pages.

There is one, and only one thing that I can see that it does well.

The Full Wiki is a product of NationMaster, and NationMaster seems to be an excellent site for comparing statistics about countries.  They are promoting The Full Wiki as a mashup of Wikipedia and Google Maps.  This mashup might be useful.  For example, when you are reading the entry on Victor Hugo you can visually see where France is.  In case you didn't know where France is.

I think we can trust this information too, as the location of France doesn't change much over time.

Oh...one more criticism...because I can't resist.

Read the indented quote at the top of this entry. I didn't make any changes from the text on the website.  It really does say WikiTravell with two 'l's. And the link is a broken one.

Wordless Wednesday - Flower Painting by 'Grandmother Van Every'

Move cursor over image for details.

Tombstone Tuesday: Belle "Sissie" (Feinstein) Newmark (1914-2002)

My paternal grandmother, Belle Feinstein, was born on August 14, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri.  The second child of Herman and Anna (Blatt) Feinstein.  As a child, her older brother, Bernard (Benny), gave her the nickname, Sissie.  The nickname remained with her the rest of her life, and ultimately the only people who referred to her by her real name were those who didn't know her, such as telephone solicitors.

As I mentioned last week, she secretly married my grandfather, Melvin Newmark, on May 10, 1936.  They had another wedding 8 months later, and it was many years before anyone found out about the first.

She passed away on October 11, 2002, and is buried at United Hebrew Cemetery in St. Louis. 

I had begun a blog five months earlier.  This is what I wrote then:

My grandmother passed away Friday, Oct 11, 2002. (Chesvan 5, 5763). Her favorite television shows were Seinfeld, Friends, and Will and Grace. Perhaps partially due to her grandkids who came over for dinner every Thursday night. But the audience share for Must See TV will now skew even younger.

Amanuensis Monday: I Know You Will Come Back to Me

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.

I meant to spend the last two Mondays of January with the transcription of the final 20 minutes of the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his siblings recorded in 1977. However, I only managed to transcribe seven of the ten minutes necessary for today's post.  So, I will push that back a week and share part of a letter my grandmother, Myrtle (Van Every) Deutsch, wrote my grandfather in March of 1943.

Weekly Genealogy Picks

Weekly Genealogy Picks -- January 17 to January 23
from genealogy blogs, newspaper articles and elsewhere

• ArchivesNext reports Flickr has a sufficiently large queue of organizations that want to join the Commons, that they have had to block new requests to handle the backlog. The Commons is Flickr's photo gallery from libraries and archives of items without any known copyright restrictions.
  

• David at Free Genealogy Tools provides some resources for African American Newspaper Archives
  

• Michael John Neill at RootDig has been noting recently several errors or strangenesses at Google Books. For example, he discovered several journals classified as Juvenile Fiction. This reminded me that Gleanings in Bee Culture, where I've found several articles mentioning my great grandfather, Melvin Van Every, is classified as Juvenile Non-Fiction. (At least they got the non-fiction part correct with that.)
  

• New Uses for Facebook: A traveler found a lost camera on the Greek Island of Mykenos, and decided to use Facebook and the principle of Six Degrees of Separation to find its owner. They were successful (it took two and a half weeks.)
  

• James Tanner at Genealogy's Star has an entry on Challenges of Genealogy for the Disabled. He asks for input. It's a topic I'm attuned to, as I work at an agency that provides services for the disabled. My first thought is that I suspect many websites we find to be great resources in our research aren't as accessible as they should be.
  

• ArchivesFound and ArchivesNext both have entries discussing Preserving the American Historical Record (PAHR), a bill in Congress "to provide federal formula grants to every state for projects that preserve historical records and make them more accessible."
  

• Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings discusses GenLighten - a clearinghouse of lookup providers.
  

• Katrina McQuarrie at Kick-Ass Genealogy has an entry on Why You Should Consider Digital Scrapbooking. However, Sally Jacobs at Practical Archivist reminds us that Presentation is Only the Icing (not the cake).
  

• Jerrie Hurd at Our Stories: The Blog shares the importance of story.
  

• A slightly deranged comic about MicroSD storage media
  

• A slightly more deranged comic about archives. (If you're unfamiliar with the punchline, you will probably not want to look it up.)
  

For other weekly lists visit:

• Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs at Genea-Musings
• Apple's Weekly Rewind at Apple's Tree
• Julie Cahill Tarr's Friday Finds at GenBlog
• Diane Haddad's Genealogy News Corral at Genealogy Insider
• Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak's Genealogical Round Up at Megan's Roots World

How Genealogy and History Can Determine Your Age - 2010

Since I did this back in 2008 and 2009 I made the necessary revision for 2010.

A close comparison of posts will illustrate what needs to be changed each year, and the comments last year included a mathematical explanation by someone on how this works, for those who are curious.

***
 This takes less than a minute. Work this out as you read .

Be sure you don't read the bottom until you've worked it out!

1. How many Great-Grandparents do you have full name, date of birth, and date of death for?

Secondary spouses don't count. Only (pardon the redundancy) direct ancestors count.

2. Multiply by the number of biological parents you have, regardless of whether or not you have any information on them. (Everyone should have the same answer here. 2.)

3. Add the number next to your paternal grandmother on your ahnentafel chart. (Once again, everyone should have the same number. 5.)

4. To honor the year the Roman Emperor, Claudius, adopted Nero -- Multiply it by 50

5. To honor King George III, ruler of Great Britain when the US revolted, add 1760, the year he ascended the throne.

6. If you haven't had your birthday yet this year, subtract 1.

7. Now subtract the four digit year that you were born.

You should have a three digit number

The first digit of this is the number of great grandparents you have all that information on!

The next two numbers are:

YOUR AGE

Don't deny it!

Note: This will not work if you are at least 100 years old. (But, congratulations!) This will also have to be tweaked, just a little, in future years. Only one step will have to be changed, though. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which one.

Took the day off from work today

Today was the anniversary of my birth, so I decided to take the day off from work and do a few things I enjoy.

At 8:55 am I was standing in front of a locked door at the St. Louis County Library. I only had to stand there for five minutes.

I had a list of two dozen issues of the St. Louis Globe Democrat I wanted to research for stories on relatives. I had obtained the list from the Globe Democrat Clippings Index. Unfortunately, all they provide is the date, and a brief description of the article. No page numbers. If I went to the Mercantile Library, where they have the clippings, I could provide them with the envelope number and they'd go right to it, but they charge fairly exorbitant prices for copying. (For non-members, it's $66/hour research and copying fee, charged in quarter-increments. So at least $16.50. And then in addition they charge 35c a copy.) The St. Louis County Library doesn't charge anything, as long as you're using one of their digital scanners. I decided I was willing to search the microfilm for the stories.

I only made it half way through the list, and there were a couple stories I searched for and couldn't find. But I found ten, three of which contained photographs. The stories included a description of a wedding, a college student who was trying to sell a pet boa constrictor, a high school student who had a year abroad with the Foreign Service, and a relative who was arrested and accused of a crime. (Will have to do some research to find out if he was convicted. I've already made the decision not to blog details about close relatives who have committed serious crimes. It will be written down for family, but not broadcast)

I left the library at 11:30, and joined my mother for lunch at Lester's Bar and Grill

I had an urge to return to the library, but I had made other plans. I went to a nearby cinema and saw Avatar in 3-D. I enjoyed it. The basic plot is certainly old. Fantasy author, Peter David, jokingly predicts that once Disney is finished filming Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel "John Carter of Mars." there will be some who accuse them of ripping off Avatar. Combine Barsoom with the Star Trek episode The Cage and add the f/x, and you have the movie. But the f/x make the film what it is. After Avatar was over, I couldn't resist a double feature, and I watched Sherlock Holmes. Not exactly the most traditional version of the Holmes character, but I thought the movie was well done.

I returned home and discovered that Blogger-in-Draft had disabled their new 'pages' feature I talked about yesterday. Pages that were created yesterday still work, and are editable, so I am glad I was quick. I suspect it won't be disabled too long though -- they're probably fixing the glitch I mentioned with the formatting.

Pages come to Blogger-in-Draft

Note: As of 9 am this morning, January 21, Pacific time, this feature was 'temporarily' disabled. While pages created work, new pages can't currently be added. Pages were restored at 9:32 PM Pacific according to the link above.


If you're actually reading this on the website, and not on Facebook, or through a newsfeed, you will see links at the top of the blog to several pages I have created.

Pages are something new for Blogger - released today in "Blogger-in-Draft." If you have a 'Blogger' blog, you can access Blogger-in-Draft at draft.blogger.com. New features for the blogging software are released there first, giving users a chance to "beta-test" them.

Those of you who use WordPress, perhaps Blogger's biggest competitor, may be scratching your head in disbelief, as WordPress has had pages for years. Basically, pages are the same thing as posts, but they don't have dates attached to them. So they don't appear in your archive. You link to them in your sidebar or underneath your header as I have done.

The Blogger-in-Draft blog has an explanation, with more details.

The pages I created are copies of pages I had created at my personal domain, and had been linking to from my sidebar. I removed the links, as they will be easier to edit and update here. Several of them do need some updating.

If you try it, and discover that your paragraph breaks are disappearing, under Post Options change "convert newlines" to "ignore newlines." That should work. Blogger will probably fix this bug soon, and you won't have to do that. Playing with something when it is in 'beta' always has its quirks.

A hat tip to Jasia, who mentioned this new feature on Facebook, and Miriam who shared it on Google Reader. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known about it.

Wordful Wednesday: Van Every Children circa 1894

Sometimes one has a photograph one wants to share on 'Wordless Wednesday', but one has something to say about it.

This photograph was in a box my maternal aunt recently shipped. She's moving, and decided instead of taking the box with her, she'd ship the contents to my mother and me. The photograph came with a letter identifying the individuals in the photograph as the older siblings of my grandmother, Myrtle Van Every, taken a few years before she was born. The letter was written by the daughter of the youngest in the photo.

Back Row (left to right) Samuel and Minnie
Front Row (left to right) Willa and Evelyn (Evva)

Evva, the youngest, was born in March of 1892, dating the photograph to not too long after that. My grandmother wasn't born until 1900. Significantly younger than her siblings, she was already an aunt by age 5. She was 38 years old before she had her first child, throwing the generational charts completely out of whack.

I've written several posts about my Uncle Sam. I've posted a poem and a letter written by Willa. Here's a photograph of my grandmother with Minnie and Evelyn, taken in 1947.

This photograph gives me some hope that I might someday find a photograph of my second great grandmother, Sarah Ann (Hartley) Denyer. She lived until 1898, and spent her final years living with the Van Every family (her daughter and son-in-law.) I'm confident she was alive when this photograph was taken, so a photograph could have been taken of her.

Tombstone Tuesday: Melvin Lester Newmark (1912-1992)

My grandfather, Melvin Lester Newmark, was born on August 27, 1912, on the one year wedding anniversary of his parents, Barney and Bertha (Cruvant) Newmark. Through his initials, he was named after his grandfather, Moshe Leyb Cruvant.

He married my grandmother, Belle Feinstein, near midnight on May 10, 1936 in Waterloo, Illinois. Neither family was told. There seems to have been no reason for the secrecy beyond the two being unable to wait for the family wedding that was held six months later in January of 1937.

He died on January 22, 1992, while vacationing in Palm Springs, Riverside, California. He is buried at United Hebrew Cemetery in St. Louis.

There are several things I believe I inherited from my paternal grandfather - a passion for word games, such as the crossword puzzle; a love for food; and a constant smile.

88th Carnival of Genealogy Has Been Posted

Jasia at CreativeGene has posted the 88th Carnival of Genealogy . There were 17 submissions on the topic of Volunteerism.

The topic for the 89th Carnival was a pleasant surprise for me.

The topic for the next edition of the Carnival of Genealogy will be: Ode to My Family's History! This time around we'll be composing a poem that tells our family's history. It can be long or short, rhyme or not rhyme, funny or serious, illustrated or not... you choose, but make it appropriate as an introduction for a book or video on your family history. The challenge is on! The deadline for submissions is February 1st, 30 submissions accepted. [more info]

I could take the easy path, and post a poem I've already written. No one would know the difference (except for the few people who read this blog that are also members of my writer's group, and who might remember the poem I chose.)

However, I suspect even if this is a popular edition, I will have enough time to compose something new. Besides, the poem I've written that would best serve as an introduction for a book of family history has already been posted to this blog, and graces the sidebar if you scroll down far enough. It's time to write something new.

I Have A Dream

Martin Luther King, Jr. - I Have A Dream