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.