A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Fulton New York Postcards Website

On December 25th the Old Fulton New York Postcards website (which, by the way, is not a website for postcards) received a major update that added a whopping 700,000 more old newspaper articles from the USA and Canada. The site, however, has an aesthetic that makes it slightly more difficult to start using than the average site. This post will help you learn to use this incredible resource to its full capacity.

Old Fulton New York Postcards homepage

3 Ways to Use Archive.org for Genealogy

Archive.org is one of the most valuable free resources for genealogy you have at your disposal. This post will teach you how to use it for your own research.

Internet Archive Home Page

5 Beginner Tips for Using the Třeboň Regional Archives

Image source

So you just found that you have Czech ancestors, you even narrowed down the specific location of those ancestors to Southern Bohemia, the region covered by the Třeboň Regional Archives. What now? Note that this guide will only cover the basics of using the archives and navigating the records, it won't deal with techniques for reading the Czech language or for finding people when nothing else is working.

The Mysterious Origins of William Smith: A Tale of an Insane Irish Man

Nearly every family has one; a seemingly-eccentric-nutter-turned-black-sheep. The ancestor who lived under a guise of normalcy for years until a seemingly insignificant event turned them sour. On the Van Wert side of my family, this person is the Irish born William Smith, my 4th great grandfather by the following line:

No notes available for Renee Schmidt

No notes available for Gregory Schmidt

No notes available for Tonya Wesselowski

No notes available for Timothy Wesselowski

No notes available for Joan Van Wert

No notes available for Reuben Van Wert

No notes available for Frances Gustafson

No notes available for Forrest Van Wert

No notes available for Carrie Blanche Smith

No notes available for Charles Henry Smith

No notes available for Tryphena Wonnacott

No notes available for William A. Smith

No notes available for Sarah Adaline Skinner

No notes available for selected family

No notes available for selected family

No notes available for selected family

No notes available for selected family

No notes available for selected family

No notes available for selected family

Tree made using SVG Family tree utility

1931 Bethany Daisy: The Senior Class pt. 3 (pg. 34-36)

This is part three of the senior class photos and part four of my ongoing series of pictures and transcriptions of the 1931 Bethany Daisy that belonged to my great grandma Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson.Frances got notes from a significant portion of the students. Many students chose not to write their letters by their senior photograph, but instead by a photograph of them doing an activity they like, or they chose to use an entire blank sheet of paper for their note, so its entirely possible people who don't have notes showing yet will have them later on in the book.

Page 34

1931 Bethany Daisy: The Senior Class pt. 2 (pg. 32-33)

This is part two of the senior class photos and part four of my ongoing series of pictures and transcriptions of the 1931 Bethany Daisy  that belonged to my great grandma Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson. Frances got notes from a significant portion of the students. Many students chose not to write their letters by their senior photograph, but instead by a photograph of them doing an activity they like, or they chose to use an entire blank sheet of paper for their note, so its entirely possible people who don't have notes showing yet will have them later on in the book.

Page 32

Saving a Full Image from ArkivDigital

Today is the last day of the free weekend for ArkivDigital and I am very happy with the number of genealogical records I have grabbed. However, I wasn't too happy with their options for saving images. If you have used ArkivDigital before you will know that when you save an image it saves only the part visible on your screen. If you zoom way out the resulting picture will be very pixelated and near impossible to read.

1931 Bethany Daisy: The Senior Class pt.1 (pg. 30-31)

This is part three of my ongoing series of pictures and transcriptions of the 1931 Bethany Daisy that belonged to my great grandma Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson. This section includes the page "Senior Class History" as well as the first page of the senior photo section. Frances got notes from a significant portion of the students. Many students chose not to write their letters by their senior photograph, but instead by a photograph of them doing an activity they like, or they chose to use an entire blank sheet of paper for their note, so its entirely possible people who don't have notes showing yet will have them later on in the book.

SENIOR CLASS HISTORY 

1931 Bethany Daisy: Staff pages (pages 13-28)

This is part two of my ongoing series of pictures and transcriptions of the 1931 Bethany Daisy that belonged to my great grandma Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson. This part will focus on the staff pages, and while my great grandma did not get signatures from all the staff or even most of the staff, she did get notes from a few.

1881---1931 

BETHANY College is fifty years old. From 

a small beginning the institution has de- 

veloped to what it is today ; two fully accredited 

colleges, the College of Arts and Sciences and 

the College of Fine Arts. 

The founder of the college was Rev. Carl 

Aaron Swensson who served as president from 

1881 until his untimely death in 1904.  

1931 Bethany Daisy: Pages 1-11

This is part of my series on the 1931 Bethany yearbook owned by my great grandma Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson. These first 11 pages are mainly historical pictures of the scenery at Bethany and tributes to Birger Sandzen.

Frances E.C. Gustafson

1931

R.E. Van Wert's Letter to the Editor: The 1964 Presidential Race

You have probably heard the old cliche, "history is written by the victors". In most cases this is true; however, with the advent of Newspapers, publishing, and journalism, it became more common for the losers to leave behind their opinions as well. I always find it interesting to read the perspectives of those on the losing side before the sides were decided. My great grandpa Reuben Everette Van Wert's  letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News expressing and explaining his support to Senator Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race is one such example.

Some background; In 1964 the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater was running against the incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Barry Goldwater, for whom my great grandpa Van Wert was a supporter. Ultimately, Goldwater suffered a major loss to Johnson, winning only 6 states compared to Johnson's 44. My great grandpa lived in Colorado, a state that Johnson won in.

Map of the 1964 U.S. Presidential Election (source)

What in the world is a Wesselowski?(And solving a Mystery)

Julius Wesselowski

The Wesselowski family name is one that is carried by only a lucky few. In fact, only about 37 people in the world can call it their own. This is largely due to a German family choosing an alternate spelling from the slightly more common 'Wesselowsky', and a man named Julius Wesselowski being one of the only members of that family to have sons. Then there is the fact that many Wesselowskis chose to change their last name to one of two variants: "Wessley" or "West". My maternal grandpa is just one of the ~37 with the surname. However, whether or not Wesselowski was my grandpa's family's true surname has long been debated. Thanks to DNA, however, those rumors have come to their conclusion. This post will tell the full story of the Wesselowskis, their families, and the genetic findings that changed my personal family history.

The Children of Emilie Wesselowski and Efroim Franz Brück

These are the biographies of the 7 children of Emilie Wesselowski and Efroim Franz Brück. They ended up all over the world in Germany, the USA, and Brazil. Several faced persecution as a result of being ethnic Jews during Nazi Germany.

Martha Brück

Birth Record of Martha Brück

Wesselowski Family Postcards

Thanks to my first cousin 1x removed, Sonya Wesselowski, I have some postcards and photographs of Kurt Wesselowski and James Wesselowski, both of whom were soldiers during WW1, and several of the photos have them in uniform. They were the children of Martin Wesselowski and lived in Germany. You can see them below:

James Wesselowski Postcards

Photo of James Wesselowski

Transcription Tuesdays: The Burial Record of Albrecht Kruszynski (Kurrentschrift)

This was one of the more difficult transcription pieces I have done. It is written in the old Kurrentschrift, a nightmare script that was eventually outlawed by Hitler. It is no longer used and is a bit of a pain to learn to read, especially if you don't know German (like me- I only know English and can get by in Spanish). I might make a post later about how I learned to read it. It was not a very fast process and I still have difficulty depending on who wrote the document.

Census2Ged 2.0

Great news! I have now made another release of my original program Census2Ged. It now works with the 1880, 1900, and 1910 U.S. Censuses. You may recall my original post about it here, I won't repeat everything that's already in it for the sake of brevity, but I will include a link to GenScriber, the program you need to use for your transcriptions in order for them to work properly with my program. It is the most fully featured transcription tool I know of, and you certainly won't be disappointed with it.

Analyzing Sources

As an IB school, my high school is very focused on teaching good writing and researching standards. A lot of these apply very directly to genealogy. For analyzing sources, we use the acronym OPVL.

The letters each refer to a different element of a source to analyze. O stands for ‘origin’, P stands for ‘purpose’, V stands for ‘value’, and L stands for ‘limitations’.

The Ribble photo studio unidentified photos

I have 4 photos from the Ribble photo studio that are unidentified, they came from either my Dwyer or Burnes family (although they may not have had those last names.) My best guess is that they are either cousins or family friends. This is what MNHS.org has to say about the studio, although I have found photos that fall out of their time ranges for other photos before:

Locations:

     Address: Saint Peter, Minnesota

       Dates of operation: 1894-1900, 1904, 1906

Decades Worked in Minnesota: 1890s; 1900s

Notes: Had a booth at Nicollet County Fair.

A nun

Transcription Tuesdays: 1933 Contract for Deed of Henry H. Dwyer and Winnifred Carey

So I know this is not a Tuesday but I wrote it on a Tuesday and forgot to post it and in my book that counts :) This is the contract for Deed between my third great grandparents (Henry H. Dwyer and Winnifred Carey) and a woman named Celestine Friedmann. I found it in my grandpa's basement.

Page 1

Transcription Tuesdays: Obituary of Anna Katharina Sipple

Since I transcribe so many articles and other documents, I thought it might be fun if every Tuesday I post some of these. This is the obituary of Anna Katharina Sipple (sometimes also written as 'Sepple' or 'Sippel'. I am currently saving up the money I need to extend her line, as I know since she was baptized in the German Lutheran Church in Hesse, her records are probably digitized online here.

Anna was my 4th great grandmother through my Schmidt family.She was the daughter of Wilhelm Sipple (born the 25th of November, 1811 in Whemar, Hessen-Kassel, Germany) and Dortha (born abt. 1800 somewhere in Prussia).

The full Newspaper Page on which Anna's obituary appears

What is known about August Ferdinand Krüger

Since my last post about Franz Albert Kruger, new information has surfaced about his brother, August Ferdinand Krüger, my 4th great grandpa. August Ferdinand was the first one to marry Ernestine Wilhelmine Warner, the second being his brother Franz Albert Krüger who I wrote about here.

Franz Albert Krüger

Today I thought I would share some basic information about my 4th great uncle Franz Albert Krüger.

Franz Albert Krüger

Photo of the family provided by Craig Hacker

Census2Ged: My New Program

I was thinking about how I could get past some brick walls in my research using neighbors to my relatives. I ended up transcribing several census pages into Genscriber and then entering everyone on them into my genealogy program as neighbors on a shared census event. However, this was tedious and took way more time than I could reasonably afford it. So I started to think about how I could use my programming knowledge to solve the problem. I wanted to be able to create trees organically using censuses while preserving nuclear family relationships. 3 days ago I started working on Census2Ged. It only works with the 1900 census as of now, but I hope to extend its functionality to other censuses in the future. This post will show you how to use it and what it produces. And, of course, you can download it for free at this link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/census2ged/

Features:

These are the features currently supported in Census2Ged:

• Works with the 1900 US census (and in the next update it will work with all censuses from 1850-1940) 
• Conforms to gedcom 5.5 Standards
• Preserves relationships between heads of the family, wives, and their children
• Records first and last names in correct fields
• Records Race and sex
• Records birth month and birth year
• Records approximate year married
• Records how many children they have living and how many are dead
• Records year of immigration and naturalization information
• Records Occupation
• Records Literacy information
• Records Property information

It does not yet support linking stepchildren, parents of heads, or other non-standard relationships.

A completed individual file looks like this:

Interview with Grandpa Tim

When I went on the trip to see my grandpa Tim Wesselowski I recorded some interviews with him. This is the transcript of the first interview.

Grandpa: well that Couch Cemetery is our family cemetery.

Me: yuup that’s it

Grandpa: There’s more people-  more relatives- I’ve got more relatives buried up there than probably anybody else in that cemetery.

Me: yup

Grandpa: and I recognize a lot of the names that aren’t, you know, ours. Claude Slate. Called Claude Slate he used to come down and go fishing with grandma and he’d go fishing with the boys up in the pond.

(post talk note: the names he mentions are related through marriage or otherwise, contrary to what grandpa thought)

//silence as grandpa Tim clicks through the findagrave site. He reaches Etta Byers’s page.

Documents found on Kansas Trip

On my trip to Jewell County, Kansas I found the time to visit the County Clerks office. Unfortunately, the time I found was not nearly enough to examine all the documents I wanted to, but I did still find some interesting ones I thought I would share today.

Transcribed Autobiography of Frances Elsie Caroline Gustafson

Frances Gustafson (my great grandmother) wrote an autobiography before passing away. I decided to transcribe it to make it easier to read, here is the autobiography in full. It seems to be incomplete and drops off in the middle of a sentence but it is still an incredible window into what it was like to live through the great depression, the dust bowl, and other historical events.

Picture of Frances Gustafson

Tip: Finding how many times an ancestor married with census notes

When an ancestor marries multiple times there can often be a lot of confusion if you are unaware of more than one marriage. When tracing the lineage of a female ancestor it can mean the difference between finding her real maiden name and running into a brick wall. Census Notes were small notations census takers made to make counting various statistics later easier. Most of these are pretty useless, but occasionally there are notes that provide valuable information. I have been noticing on several different censuses that sometimes the census taker would note down the number of marriages the person has had. This isn't true for all censuses of course but it's certainly something to look out for.

The way the number of marriages is notated is a number after the "M" (standing for 'married') in the census sections about whether a person is single, married, widowed, or divorced. Here are some examples:

My trip to Kansas: Things I did and saw

I am currently on an almost 2 week-long trip to Mcpherson Kansas to see my grandpa Tim Wesselowski and to do some genealogical research. Thus far it has been an extremely successful and eventful trip, one that has provided the answer to a 100-year-old mystery (although that part of the trip warrants its own post). In this post I will simply write about the things I saw, what I did, and the best parts of the trip.

I'll start off by listing off the genealogy related things I did, although I won't go into detail here, the post would be far too long!

1. Scanned in over 500 (as of today) family photos in my grandpa's possession
2. Recorded about 3 hours of an interview (done over several sessions) with my Grandpa Tim about his childhood, his parents, and his grandparents.
3. Visited the Couch Cemetery and the Jewell City Cemetery and took pictures of the graves and visited with deceased relatives.
4. Visited the Court House in Mankato and found a lot of records on the family.

You can look forward to more detailed descriptions of all those things in future posts- this one will be about my sightseeing excursions and miscellaneous activities I partook in.

I'll start with today and go backward:

Today my mom, my grandpa Tim, and I journeyed to the border of Kansas and Nebraska, finding ourselves in the rolling hills and expansive plains that constitute the rural county of Jewell. The trip was specifically planned to coincide with the solar eclipse. We imagined watching the sky turn an inky black, the moon blotting out the sun so, for a fleeting couple of minutes, a million stars could paint the sky deep hues of blue and purple.

Unfortunately, that did not happen. We went up to Couch Cemetery to watch and the sky got slightly dim at best. The clouds that decided to roll in about 3 minutes before 1:01 (the time the eclipse was supposed to peak) also did a pretty great job of making it impossible to see anything interesting. It was still pretty darn cool though and the dim lighting made for perfect picture taking weather. Here are some snapshots from the evening.

Couch Cemetery Mid Eclipse

Me, looking through my phone at the sun (All the stores were out of eclipse glasses)

Writing Master Source Names in Legacy Family Tree

I recently realized that I really needed to start getting my Master sources straight. The Source Writer is the main reason why I love Legacy Family tree. It makes writing high quality sources super easy and fast. However, family files will very quickly accumulate a large number of master sources in a very short amount of time. That's why organizing them and coming up with naming conventions is so important, which is what I will show you how to do today.

This is what my sources look like currently. As you can see they are not really organized and the naming conventions vary from source to source. You'll notice that none of my sources are person-specific. That is just personal preference; I use each master source dozens of times for multiple people to save time.

The first thing I will do is come up with naming conventions. The exact format I prefer is: "Date RecordType State/Country County Website". After renaming all of my master sources for the 1910 census, this is what it looks like:

As you can see I have used star signs, dash marks, and parenthesis to separate the record type, location, and source website from each other. I think this increases readability and makes it easier to immediately spot the one you are looking for.

This format organizes the master sources in a very specific way:

1. It sorts your sources by date
2. It then organizes further by the type of record
3. Next it sorts by either the state or country it is in. You want the state first so that all the Master Sources for that state and date stay by each other. Otherwise it will organize alphabetically by the county
4. It organizes alphabetically based on the original website the master source is for.

Let me know in the comments how you organize your sources, or tell me how this method works out for you!

How I Became Interested in Genealogy

Sometime during my 6th grade year we were learning about the American Revolution. For some reason or another the topic came up at home and that was when my mom told me the story of Isaac Van Wart.

She told me that as Major John André was en route to deliver secret documents detailing the plans of the American Army to Benedict Arnold three men stopped him. They discovered the documents and turned him in as a spy and a traitor. These men stopped an event that could have led to the defeat of the United States and a victory for the British. She also told me that one of these men, Isaac Van Wart, was related to me in some way. She said her uncle had done a lot of research on the family and discovered some really cool things. I then looked Isaac up on google and came across this picture:

The future of Genetic Genealogy

I recently came across this article by ancestry.com. A quick summary: Ancestry was able to reconstruct a partial genome for a man named David Speegle and his two wives using the shared segments of his descendants. The article finishes with "AncestryDNA (will probably not) help reconstruct the DNA of your great-great-great-grandfather". This is probably true since Ancestry currently does not incorporate a chromosome browser into their DNA package. It does, however, bring up the question: would it be possible to reconstruct the DNA of our ancestors on a larger scale?

How to track Twins in Legacy Family Tree

As many of you may know, the tendency of mothers to have fraternal twins is a genetic one. Fraternal twins run in nearly all lines of my family tree. In fact, I am one myself! I recently decided to start tracking these twins using Legacy Family Tree and decided to share the steps to do this.

There are 2 main options for tracking twins in Legacy Family Tree. The first is by marking their 'child status' as a twin. I will show the steps for this using my great grandmother, Lillian Penas, and her twin sister, Helen Penas.

First, navigate to the "family view" of the person you wish to mark as a twin.

The family view for Lillian Penas

How to Scan in Post Cards So The Front and Back Stay Together

I recently received a package full of old post cards, books, and tin types among other things from my great uncle. They are amazing; its so incredible to be able to read the handwriting of ancestors from over a hundred years ago. I started scanning them in, of course, but soon ran across a problem. How could I quickly and efficiently save the fronts and the backs of the post cards at the same time? After a bit of searching I found a solution.

First make sure you have scanned in your post card, both front and back separately. Make sure they are cropped properly as well. If your printer does not crop your photos for you automatically then I recommend installing Irfanview. Irfanview is a free and open source photo viewing software that comes stacked with a variety of options- including an 'Auto Crop Borders' tool that will trim off the extra white space for you.

The 'Auto Crop Boarders' Tool in Irfanview

Why you should switch from Evernote to One Note

It seems like a lot of people choose to use Evernote instead of One Note for organizing/compiling their research. I too had fallen into this mindset. Then one day while I was adding some photos to a note I got a message that made me completely change my mind:

Writing a Biography Part One: Research and Citations

When I first started doing genealogy I knew that my goal would ultimately be to write biographies for as many of my ancestors (and their families) as possible. After lots of trial, error, and research I have finally begun this process. My next several posts will be a series that will go in depth on every step I now follow when writing these biographies.

Step one: Organizing Research and Preparing Citations

This is, of course, the most important step. It's important to have documentation that supports your facts; it prevents mistakes and false assumptions from being made and allows anyone reading the biography to reference back to the original sources and verify your information. I personally use Legacy Family Tree software to organize everything. It has a very organized system for citations that makes it fairly simple to add meaningful and useful sources to your work.

Take, for example, this newspaper article:

How to use github to host your genealogy website for free (for complete beginners)

I was looking for ways that I could host my small, work in progress, genealogy website for free. All the options seemed to have negatives that outweighed the positives, or had limited storage amounts and no guarantee of long term hosting. Then I remembered Github pages. This will be a full tutorial on how to do what I did for complete beginners. It will assume you have a website generated by your genealogy program. (I recommend GRAMPS as a good free program.)

The end result will be something like this (my website):

https://reneeschmidt.github.io/Genealogy/individuals.html

What is Github?

Github is a code sharing website. It is mainly for open-source projects, which means projects where the code is free for viewing by anyone who wants to.  This is the link to the github homepage: https://github.com/ .

Getting Your Github Account

Simply go to github and create a free account, Its that easy!

Installing Everything You Need

Downloading GIT

GIT, unfortunately, does not work with just the website. You will need to install an application on your computer in order to get it to work.

First go to the following link: https://git-scm.com/downloads

Click on the operating system that you are working on. In my case its windows so I clicked the “Windows” button.

Funeral Cards

I was searching through my basement when I came across a box stuffed full of old pictures and old items. It turned out it was my dads old family heirlooms and keepsakes. Inside were some old funeral cards for lots of my relatives both distant and direct. Since I don't think there are any other surviving copies of some of these cards I figured I'd post them here for posterity:

Agnes York Funeral Card

Died September 3, 1950

What I've learned from scanning in excessive amounts of photos

To say I have a lot of photos would be an understatement. I bought myself a 1 terabyte hard drive to keep all of them on, and I've already used up a quarter of the space. About 30,000 of these photos are of me and my sisters (my dad was a bit excessive with the photos when we were little), and about 700 are photos I've scanned in. The first hundred or so I scanned in using the scanner on our printer.

Our printer, as I quickly discovered, is meant for printing- not scanning. It moved at a snail pace and scanned in at a max of 600 dpi, which is fine for most pictures but with certain exceptionally tiny pictures a larger dpi is necessary. It also only scanned pictures in as jpegs. I don't like jpegs at all. They are too unpredictable for scans in my opinion and since so much data is compressed in them and detail lost they reduce the maximum possible quality and detail I can instill in them with photoshop. I much prefer png or tiff. Another problem with my printer scanner was it only scanned in 1 picture at a time and the automatic cropping was poorly done. Sometimes I'd have to put construction paper under my photos so it didn't crop off parts of the picture and crop manually later on.

Luckily for me my dad mentioned an old flatbed scanner we had in our basement. As soon as I started using it I knew I could never go back. Its an Epson Perfection 3490 photo and its perfect. Of course when I first started using it I decided I would scan every photo in at the max dpi. My tip to you is: don't do this. Every photo was half a gb and it was a pain to resize them all. I usually go with 700 for small Polaroids and 400-500 dpi for the more modern and larger Kodak film. But, once I got that figured out it was amazing. I can scan in and label 300 photos in a few hours because it allows you to scan in multiple photos at once. And its speedy. If you don't have a good scanner like this it is well worth the investment.

And now I'll finish with some of my favorite photos I've scanned of the Wesselowski / Byers side of the family. (most of these have been photoshopped for quality)

Helen Byers Basketball Captain 1926 as a senior in high school.

John Anthony Kruszynski- Biography

My Relation:

He was my Great Grandfather on my paternal side.

Description:

John was tall man of medium weight. At the age of 19 he was 58 inches tall and 176 pounds⁵. He had blue eyes, light skin, and light brown hair.He was also bilingual in Polish and English.¹ 

Biography:

John A. Kruszynski was born on April 21st 1897 ¹ to Leon Kruszynski and Rosie Kruszynski. Of their 7 children he was one of the only 3 to survive to adulthood. ²At the age of three he lived with his family in his home at 720 Minnehaha Avenue. On a typical day his father would go to work as a machine operator at a box factory while his mother stayed home to look after him and his little sisters Helen and Katherine.³