Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Have You Made Progress on Your 2024 Genealogy Goals?

Let's see how well I'm doing on my genealogy plans for this year, since Randy Seaver has made that the challenge for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  Marian B. Wood wrote a blog post, Halfway through 2024:  Genealogy Progress and Plans, to assess her progress to date in 2024.  This is an excellent idea for an SNGF challenge.

2.  How are you doing with your genealogy goals for 2024?  If you did not make goals for 2024, what goals do you hope to achieve in the rest of the year?

3.  Tell us about your goals in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Not going to color-code mine as Randy did.  I think I'll use bold and indentation instead.

I wrote about my 2024 genealogy goals in January (coincidentally, for a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post) here, in case you want to read the original post.

I set six goals for myself.

• Get back to posting regularly on my blog. 👍

    • Status:  Definitely improved over last year!  In 2023 I had a grand total of only 33 posts, and I already have 47 posts this year (not counting this one), before the end of June.  I'd say I'm doing quite well on this goal.

• Finish going through scans of the photo bonanza from my sister. 👍

    • Status:  I have done some more labeling of photos, but I have a long way to go.  I know I will need assistance in identifying all the cars my father took photos of, but someone has volunteered to help me with that.  So I'm doing okay on this goal, but I need to make sure I don't let myself slack off.

• Pursue more research on the man who is possibly the child my aunt gave up for adoption (and at least seems to be related to our family). 😟

    • Status:  I haven't done anything with this project yet this year, so I better get a move on.

• Finish posting the rest of the family events from my family tree database.

    • Status:  I'm not behind on this, since I need to pick it up again in November.  It's on my calendar, but it's another thing I need to keep track of and not slip up as I did the past two years.

• Do more research on finding my biological great-grandfather. 😟

    • Status:  I haven't done anything with this yet this year.  I know I need help at this point.  I've determined that trying to find a descendant of my prime candidate isn't going to be particularly helpful.  I did have someone offer to help with looking at the DNA trail, so I need to ask her if she's still willing.  And I still need to pursue trying to find a photograph of Mr. X to see if there's an obvious resemblance, which wouldn't hurt.

• Create some new genealogy presentations I've been thinking about. 👍

    • Status:  I already have accomplished this by creating one new talk about the U.S. census, and I know I'll be making another new presentation soon, because I'm committed to giving a talk about New York newspapers for the New York State Family History Conference in September.  So this goal also is in good shape.

When I posted my goals in January, I was worried that maybe I was being a little too ambitious.  Now that I've put all this down in writing, however, I feel pretty good about how well I'm doing.  Three are good and one hasn't come up yet on the calendar.  I do need to knuckle down on the other two, though.

And I need to thank Marian for having cute little icons I could copy and use in my post!

Did You Ever Use a Typewriter?

IBM Selectric II
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

I discovered that June 23 is celebrated as National Typewriter Day (or sometimes just as Typewriter Day).  June 23 was chosen apparently because a patent was granted to Christopher Latham Sholes on that day in 1868.  His Wikipedia page says that he invented the QWERTY keyboard (which was designed to slow typists down), but the patent awarded in 1868 doesn't seem to be for that version, but rather an earlier model.

I learned to touch type (typing without looking at your fingers) on a typewriter in high school in a semester-long class offered for that specific purpose.  My mother had suggested I learn to use a typewriter because it would be a useful skill.

During the semester, I got up to 54 words per minute overall and 51 per minute with no errors.  This was with the older style of typewriter that had the carriage you had to manually push back at the end of every line.  I don't remember the name of my teacher, but she was so excited by my speed that she wanted me to to secretarial school.  I didn't have the heart to tell her that I had higher aspirations than being a secretary, but I did figure out that my rate was better than average.

My mother was right:  I was able to apply my touch typing skills almost right away in college.  Before desktop computers became the norm, I typed lots of papers for people and made money doing so, which was really helpful, because I went to the University of Southern California on scholarships, not on my family's money.

After I graduated, desktop computers began to be introduced to many of the departments at USC, and my typing skills gave me a leg up on keyboarding.  Every time I applied for a job in a new department I was timed again.  The fastest rate I remember was 108 words per minute; I think that was with no errors.

For a long time I owned and maintained a typewriter, before I could afford a computer.  I favored the IBM Selectric (I think I owned a blue Selectric II), and I had a decent collection of elements, which were how you changed your typeface in the old days.  I remember I stored them in plastic cases specially designed for them (I think I had four cases!).  You had to change the element each time you wanted to change your font, say from regular to Italic.  I loved that typewriter!  But eventually I was able to afford a computer, and the need for the typewriter diminished to the point that I couldn't justify keeping it anymore.  I don't even remember if I was able to find someone who wanted it or I just had to dump it.

IBM Selectric elements in storage case
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Genealogy "Rabbit Hole" Did You Go Down Recently?

Tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic from Randy Seaver is a favorite of genealogical researchers everywhere.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  What genealogy "rabbit hole" did you go down recently?  Did you have genealogy fun?  How did it help your genealogy research?

2.  Share your response on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

What?  Genealogists falling down rabbit holes?  Who would have thought such a thing could happen?

The most recent rabbit hole I went down was totally the fault of Reclaim the Records, that scrappy little nonprofit that's filing lawsuits all over the country when records jurisdictions don't follow Freedom of Information rules, even their own, and then sharing all the records they acquire freely and publicly through the Internet Archive.  I love them!  (And I remember when Brooke Schreier Ganz started the whole thing!)

I don't remember when the various New Jersey indices were posted, and RtR doesn't put dates on a lot of its posts, but a couple of months ago I started poking around.  They have New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901–2016; New Jersey Death Index, 1904–2017; New Jersey Birth, Marriage, and Death Indices, 1901–1903 and 1901–1914; and New Jersey Geographic Birth Index and Delayed Birth Index, 1901–1929.

I have a lot of New Jersey relatives.  For many of them I did not have specific birth, marriage, or death dates.  My father and both of his parents were born in New Jersey, and I had their information, but between multiple relationships on both sides and half-siblings all over the place, I didn't have documentation for everybody else.  So I decided one evening to start looking.

I think it started innocently enough.  All I wanted originally was to find the birth dates of three of my grandfather's siblings, for whom I had only "about" and a year.  And then I figured while I was looking, I should find all of the siblings in the birth index, just to verify that I had the correct dates.  Oh, and maybe I should look up all their marriages.  Oh wait, some of those siblings didn't live to adulthood, so I should look for them in the death index.

Several hours later . . . .

I had lots of fun, but I still don't have everyone!  I found one of the birth dates, but two are still missing.  The birth index showed a different date for one of the siblings for whom I already had a date.  I can't find death dates for three children.  And three marriage dates are still hiding from me also (although it's possible one or more of those might not have taken place in New Jersey; lots of people in Jersey went to good old Elkton, Maryland, as my aunt did).  Or maybe some of those couples didn't actually get married.

One amusing discovery was finding the original index entry for my grandfather and then a handwritten one based on his amended birth certificate.

I wrote several years ago about my frustrating and fruitless search for my grandfather's birth certificate and how it took my sister going in person to the New Jersey State Archives to discover that he had been recorded as a girl on his birth record, explaining why I had been unsuccessful in three attempts at finding a birth certificate for a boy.  The lovely archivists had also unearthed an amendment to the original birth certificate, filed by my great-grandmother 37 years later, changing Grampa from a girl to a boy.

Well, both of those records are reflected in the state birth index.

Birth index showing Gertrude Armstrong (bottom), born April 6, 1903, page 7173
(edited image)

Birth index showing Bertram L. Sellers (bottom), born April 6, 1903, page 7173
(edited image)

And in a very strange coincidence, the handwriting for the entry for the amended birth certificate strongly resembles my grandfather's handiwriting.

My Father's Photos for World Giraffe Day

I still have many, many photos to share from the bonanza that my sister sent me on an innocent-looking flash drive.  Did you know that June 21 is World Giraffe Day?  I learned that when I found several photos of giraffes among the collection.

The page I found that discusses World Giraffe Day has some factoids about them, but it doesn't mention that their tongues are purple.  I think I learned that watching an episode of Wild Kratts.  Scientists aern't sure, but the dark color of the tongue may help protect it from sunburn while the giraffe is eating.  Unfortunately, none of my father's photos shows that cool purple tongue.

I think that's my stepsister Cynthia in the last photo.

Wordless Wednesday

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Three Things for Father's Day

Since it was for Father's Day, I waited until today to do this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  It's Father's Day on Sunday.  Tell us three things about your father, or one of your grandfathers (or another male ancestor), that have influenced you in your life.

2.  Share your response on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

I've been thinking a lot recently about my father and racing, so that's my focus today.  And yes, his interest in racing has influenced me.

1.  The fact that I grew up watching a lot of racing in person and on TV meant that I ended up seeing a fair number of car crashes.  I grew up with a healthy respect for the damage that cars can do when they go fast.  It has influenced me to drive the speed limit perhaps a little more than the average person does.

2.  I cannot think of Memorial Day weekend without thinking of the Indianapolis 500.  We knew every year when Memorial Day came around what my father, and by extension we kids, would be doing:  The TV would be showing the Indy 500, and we would often watch it with Daddy, or at least I would.  I don't really remember the specifics of the races, but I remember watching them with him.

3.  I have an unusual recognition of certain landmarks.  Once I was driving east on I-10, and to the north was a huge empty lot with a big pile of dirt in the middle.  I kept looking at it as I was driving past because it seemed oddly familiar.  I realized it was the former Ontario Raceway, which I must have gone to with Daddy to watch some races.  Even stripped down to nothing, it rang a bell.

The same kind of thing happened to me when I drove from the San Francisco Bay area to Milwaukee in the summer of 1993 for a convention.  Heading east on I-80 this time, as the highway transitioned from Nevada to Utah, I saw a sign with Bonneville on it.  I was trying to remember why I recognized that name, and then I saw the vast expanse of white that is the salt.  I suddenly shouted out, "It's the Bonneville Salt Flats!" (which kind of surprised my traveling companions).  Daddy used to watch when people raced and did speed trials on the salt flats, and I watched right alongside him.

Lynn Sellers

 

Loving Day 2024

Yesterday, June 12, was Loving Day, when we commemorate and celebrate the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision that struck down the antimiscegenation laws in the United States, at that time still clung to in sixteen states in the South, which held that just because one person was black and another white that it was not legal for them to marry, no matter how much they loved each other.  And I am thrilled to add another happy couple's marriage to my family tree.

Ally and Adrien, May 25, 2024

Wordless Wednesday

But That Doesn't Add Up Right

I posted last month about finding my great-great-grandparents' marriage record and several other family records in a recent data upload by the Ukraine Research Group on JewishGen.org.  But now I have to worry about how accurate the years are on those records as they are indexed.

I found a Russian birth record for one of my cousins, Dvorah Kardish, the daughter of Moishe Kardish and Rivka Polatnick.  The index entry shows Dvorya Kardish, daughter of Moshe, son of Chaim Duvid, and Rivka, daughter of Leyb.  This certainly sounds like my family member!  The entry indicates she was born January 21, 1899.  I clicked on the image link.

Record #9
Birth record for Dvorya Kardish
January 21 / 12 Shevat
Father Moshe Chaim-Duvid, mother Rivka daughter of Leyb
Kamenets Podolsky, Podolia, Russian Empire
(image has been edited to crop out some of the other records on the page)

But when I went to enter this information in my family tree, I noted a few inconsistencies.

There is a note on the page for the record above Dvorya's that refers to 1897.  How could there be a note about something that happened to a child in 1897 if the child wasn't born until 1899?

Second, I have found Dvorya enumerated with the Kardish family in an 1895 Russian revision list (kind of like a census).  If she wasn't born until 1899, that just couldn't happen (that's a really big twinkle in someone's eye).

Third, Dvorya's first child (at least the first I know about) was born in 1915 (I found her birth record in this upload), which would make Dvorya only 16 years old at the time.  Not a deal-breaker, but not likely.  (Yes, I realize the year could be wrong on her daughter's record.)

And not as definitive, but still important to take into account, an 1899 birth would change Dvorya's position in the accepted birth order of the children in that family.  I often tell people that before knowing your exact birth date was an important fact in everyday life, most people didn't know precisely when they were born, but they did usually know who was the oldest child, who was second, etc., down to the youngest.  And the birth order that I was told matches that in the revision list.

So now I had four data points pointing to the possible inaccuracy of the birth year quoted in the JewishGen index.

Obviously, this required further investigation.

The page with Dvorya's birth record does not have a year written on it anywhere I could see to indicate when these births had taken place or were recorded.  I looked several pages before and after but none of them has a year written on it to indicate when the births occurred.  The only one that has a year on it, a few pages before the page in question, has a big block of text in the middle of the page and the year 1898 at the end of the text.  It looks to be some kind of "this is wrapping up the end of the year" note.  I considered that maybe the indexers had used it as an indication that the pages following were for 1899.

Working on the hypothesis that the page with Dvorya's birth had somehow fallen out and been [re]placed out of order in the record book, I looked at the information on the sheet that I probably could rely on:  that she had been born on January 21 on the Christian calendar, which equaled 12 Shevat on the Jewish calendar.  The months were abbreviated at the top of the page, and while I don't know the names of the months in the Jewish calendar well enough to recall them, I could see that the month started with "sh", so I Googled "Jewish months", and only Shevat starts with that.

To try to resolve the problem, I went to SteveMorse.org, clicked on Steve's handy Jewish Calendar Conversions in One Step page, changed the readout to the 57th century in the Jewish era so I could see years for the 19th century, changed the Christian date to January 21, and started going year by year through the Jewish years until I got January 21 and 12 Shevat in the same year.  Yay, it's 1891 (5651 on the Jewish calendar)!

Except I then remembered that the Russians were still on the Julian calendar in the 19th century, but the Jewish calendar was going by the Gregorian dates and Steve's page shows Gregorian by default.  Oops.

So I went back, changed the readout to Julian, set my date as 12 Shevat, and scrolled through years on the Christian calendar line.

Aha!  The year in which 12 Shevat and January 21 were the same day in the Julian calendar then became 1890 (5650 on the Jewish calendar).  That resolved the three concrete inconsistencies and kept Dvorya's birth order in the family the same.

Hooray!

It appears that the pages in the birth registration book are out of order, but that's how they are now and how they were filmed.

I fixed my date question, but how do we correct that problem?  How many more pages in this book are out of order?  How many people will have enough information beforehand, as I did, to realize that there's a problem?  And how many more of the digitized record books might have the same problem?

And what does the note from 1905 on the left side of Dvorya's birth record say?

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Most Frustrating Research Challenge

This week's challenge from Randy Seaver is one of those Saturday Night Genealogy Fun questions when I know right away what my answer is.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  One of the goals of every genealogy researcher is to solve difficult name and relationship problems.  What is one of your most frustrating research challenges that you have not yet solved? 

2.  Share your challenging problem on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

Yup, didn't even have to think twice.

Definitely, my most frustrating research challenge that I have not yet solved is determining who my paternal grandfather's biological father was.

I have been writing since 2016 (is it really eight years already?!), when I showed with Y-DNA testing that my father (and by extension my grandfather) was not biologically a Sellers, about my search for my grandfather's biological father.

"I'm Apparently a Sellers by Informal Adoption" was when I announced the results of the Y-DNA testing, way back on February 6, 2016.  I compared my father's Y-DNA to his male cousin's and easily determined that they did not descend from the same man in a genealogically relevant timeframe and that my family branch are not biologically Sellerses.  And so began the hunt for my grandfather's biological father.

I wrote about the initial research on December 3, 2016, coincidentally for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:  "Who Is Your MRUA?" (MRUA means "most recent unknown ancestor.")  My MRUA is my great-grandfather.  My father matched two men named Mundy at 111 – 4 markers, so I focused my search for a viable Mundy.  Suzanne McClendon, one of my readers, went to town on finding newspaper articles, and we identified a likely candidate as a man named Bertram Mundy.

Another Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic encouraged me to write about my continuing research.  I posted "Research Grief" on September 9, 2017 (a mere eight days after having moved to Gresham, Oregon).  At that time I had researched back two generations of the Mundy family and found no living descendants after following them forward in time.  I was planning to go back another generation in my search.

About a year and a half after my December 2016 post, Randy used the same topic for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  For the May 26, 2018 version of "Who Is Your Most Recent Unknown Ancestor (MRUA)?", I wrote an update of where I was on my research.  I had not researched further back on Bertram Mundy's family tree, but I had come up with some other things I could do, such as get a copy of Mundy's divorce file and try to find anyone who was related to him to inquire about family stories.

Since that post, I have done some additional research.  After researching back four generations and finding no living descendants, I have abandoned the idea of tracking a Mundy cousin down and paying for an autosomal test.  Anyone I could find at this point will be so distantly related that the likelihood of sharing enough DNA to be relevant is very small.

My new goal is trying to find a photograph of good old Bert Mundy and comparing that to my grandfather and father's looks.  Not as scientific, but yes, I am grasping at straws.  I also still need to obtain Bert's divorce file to see if anything is mentioned about philandering.  Finding my great-grandmother's name in the file would be a smoking gun, but I'm not holding my breath on that.  And there is still the off-chance I might find some documentation of Bert having traveled to the Philadelphia area around July or August 1902.

One other thing I have done is ask a couple of friends who do search angel work for adoptees if they can help.  One said yes but then had a baby shortly afterward and is kind of busy with other things still.  It's possible that someone with more experience with DNA might be able to gain more information from what I have, which is not only my father's DNA but also that of two of his half-sisters, all of them children of my grandfather and each from a different mother.  So that's still on my list.