A Family Portrait

I love finding out the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE on my family tree, but a photo of my ancestor really makes them come alive in my mind. I was always told that I looked like my grandma Marie. I never saw any resemblance because I only remembered my grandmother as an old woman. However, when my aunt gave me some photos of her as a younger woman, I saw what others who had known her in earlier days saw. Likewise, my sister recently pointed out how much my youngest son looked like my father in photos of the two at approximately the same age.

If your parents and/or grandparents are still living, they are the obvious people to approach for photographs of themselves. If they don't have any, your aunts, uncles, and cousins may. Today's technology is a great place to turn to next. I once found a photograph of a 2nd great-grandfather simply by entering his name into a search engine and clicking on images. I have also found photos of ancestors by simply asking for them on family history message boards. Social networking sites make it easy to request and share old family photos.



Recently, I have been entering my collected family history data into ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. Occasionally, when I search for source records in Ancestry or FamilySearch, I find links to sources like passports, newspapers, and even school yearbooks. These sources often contain photographs. I attach the photographs to the individuals in my family tree by following these steps:

1. Press the print screen (prtsc) key on the computer to take a screen shot of the web page with the photo.

2. Paste the screen shot into the basic graphics/painting software that came with my computer.

3. Click on the select feature and draw a box around the photo.

4. Click copy.

5. Open a new page in the graphics program.

6. Paste the photo I selected and copied.

7. If the photo is surrounded by unwanted white area on the bottom and right side, I click on the corner dot and pull that corner in to get rid of the white space.

8. Click "save as," then name and save the photo. I can then upload the photo to whatever site I want and attach it to an individual.

There are probably other ways to capture and save photos you find online, but this is the method I use.

If you use FamilySearch, you can download the related Memories app to your smart phone.  You can then use the camera on your phone to take pictures of old photos and documents and upload them to FamilySearch directly through the Memories app.  This is so easy!

So go ahead, add some photos to your pedigree chart and online family tree. Maybe the photos you post will help someone see that they look like their great grandparent!

Storycorps is coming to town!

Sometimes I am lucky enough to catch the StoryCorps segment on NPR (National Public Radio) as I drive to work on Friday mornings. If you are not familiar with the StoryCorps project, the mission of the project is to:



I often find myself in tears, either of joy or sadness, by these thoughtful stories of individual struggles and insights as shared by the people who experience them. After listening to one of these stories, I can't help but wonder what sort of story I would share if I were in that recording booth. I heard recently that the StoryCorps booth is coming to a nearby town. I don't plan on going to the booth, but I was excited all the same because I can count on more Friday morning radio stories.

You don't need a StoryCorps booth to record the stories of your loved ones. Grab a tape recorder or download an app onto your phone and just do it.

Here are a few suggestions from the maven :

• Ask open-ended questions to to get your storyteller to open up. In general, avoid questions that solicit only a yes or no answer. 
• If you want to interject, limit your input to questions concerning details and feelings about their experience(s). 
• If you want your guest to talk about a particular experience or period in time, do some research of your own first so that you can more easily ask follow-up questions. 
• Don't interrupt your storyteller with your own stories, save those for a recording of your own. This is your guest's time to open up and share. 

Family Medical Pedigree

 Over the years I have filled out not a few questionnaires about my family medical history.  You know, the type that asks:  Have you or anyone in your family ever suffered from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, headaches, liver disease, kidney disease, brain-eating zombies, etc.  The older I get, the more boxes I seem to be able to check off on these questionnaires.  A few years ago I reached the age whereupon AARP invitations began to appear in my mailbox weekly. This is also the age when, at my my yearly check-up, doctors tsk, tsk, tsk at me, telling me to cut back on the mint chip ice cream, lose a few pounds, and exercise more. 

The AARP invites and friendly reminders from my doctor eventually got me to thinking, just what has everyone in my ancestry suffered and died from?  I opened up a new file in my genealogy software program and entered only birthdates and death dates.  In place of my parents and grandparents' names I listed their cause of death and age at death. I was able to gather the causes of death from death certificates, death registers, and obituaries. If there was another medical issue I included it elsewhere under that ancestor's listing.  The end result was a simple and very informative pedigree chart showing my family medical history.  I could see at a glance the lines where diabetes or heart issues were rampant.  It was also easy to see which lines were long lived or tended to suffer early deaths.  I sent a copy to each of my siblings and received rave reviews.

The Spark

Can you remember the exact moment that you became interested in finding out more about your ancestors?  If you can, then I hope you will take some time to write about that moment and share it with your family.

When I was 9 years old, the only grandmother I can remember passed away. From the time of Grandma's death until Grandpa died about six years later, Dad would stop by Grandpa’s house once a week, on the way home from work, and bring him home to our house for dinner.  I loved having Grandpa come for dinner, mostly because after dinner we would have the only regular family game time I can remember.  Mom would get out a deck of cards and we would sit around the table to play Rummy or Tripoley (Royal Rummy).  I have not played either game in over 30 years and don’t remember the rules of either, but I do remember the fun I had playing these games weekly with my grandpa, parents, and siblings.  This game time is a treasured memory.

After the card game was over, Dad would drive Grandpa home and he would often invite one or more of us children to come with him.  On one of these trips, as Dad was driving down a particular road, Grandpa pointed to an old farm house up on a hill and said, “That looks like the place where I used to come to visit my mother’s people when I was a boy.” 

His mother’s people? 

I had never thought about Grandpa having a mother.  And apparently, not only did he have a mother, but his mother had “people” too!  Was that old farmhouse really where his mother’s family had lived?  I tucked Grandpa’s comment in the back of my mind and wondered about it now and then, even after the old farmhouse on the hill was razed and the land had been developed into a golf course as part of a new county park.

Fast forward about 10 years and I was living in an apartment near the county courthouse.  In recent years I had discovered a little about Grandpa’s family from my aunt but wanted to know more.  One day I happened to have a rare day off work and my sister was visiting me.   I told her about Grandpa’s comment of years earlier and asked if she’d like to take a walk to the county courthouse with me.  She was intrigued and agreed to the adventure. 

When we got there, we were directed to a particular room with a mural-sized map of the county on the wall.  A man asked what he could help us with.  I pointed to the county park on the map and told him that I wanted to find out who had owned that land before it became a park.  I got the impression he'd never had a request like that before, but he got out some microfiche and, after looking through them, wrote some numbers down and sent us off with them to another room. 

After another adventure in microfiche and a few more helpful people, my sister and I ended up in a huge, musty smelling room full of shelves that were filled end to end with old, leather bound books.  Another helpful person, using some numbers we had written down, selected a few of the books.  We looked up the page numbers we had noted for the volumes given to us and, after looking through a few books, found what we had hoped to find:  right before us was a deed involving the sale of a portion of the land in question nearly a hundred years earlier!  The seller was my grandfather’s grandmother, Addie. Tears welled up as I realized that I had proven Grandpa right - that old farmhouse was the place where he visited his mother's people.

While Grandpa’s comment of years earlier had been the moment in time that sparked my interest in family history, that musty volume of recorded deeds was the moment when my interest caught fire. In the 30+ years since then, that fire has steadily burned within my heart and mind and I hope it is never extinguished.