Wordless Wednesdays

 

What Is Happening to FamilySearch Centers?

I have volunteered with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for 24 years, helping people with genealogy and family history.  When I started, in Oakland, California, I was at a Family History Center.  Later, the same location was called a Multi-Stake Regional Family History Center.  Then it became a FamilySearch Library.  Now I think they’re all FamilySearch Centers (FSC) except for the mother ship in Salt Lake City.

It is reasonable to assume that during 24 years many changes have occurred in how things are done at FSC’s.  One of the biggest was the transition to doing so much research online, which meant that FSC’s all now have lots of computers for visitors to work on (in Oakland, we had more than 75).  It would not be reasonable for me to expect that other resources and procedures would remain static.  But recent changes at my FSC have me worrying what will happen next.

I currently volunteer at the FSC in Gresham.  Over the past several months, we received several new computers (the church regularly upgrades its hardware).  It took a while to get them all up and running.  When they finally were operational, other staff and I discovered that only about a third of our computers are still running on Windows OS.  The others are now using Chrome OS.

No problem, I thought.  I am still bilingual (Mac and Windows), and I used to be trilingual (desktop publishing on an Atari ST, anyone?).  I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to learn yet another OS.

I was kind of right. Opening the Chrome browser was easy as pie. But that’s all I was able to do.

I couldn’t find a “desktop.”  When I minimized the browser, I saw the wallpaper on what seemed to be the desktop.  But there were no icons for other programs, and I couldn’t actually access the desktop.  When I typed Ctrl-N, which in Windows or on a Mac would give me a new window that showed what files were there, I got a new browser window.  Say what?

I tried downloading an alternative browser to see how that would work.  I couldn’t.  The computer wouldn’t let me.  It just wouldn't download the file.

Since there were no other icons, that meant that the result of all my months of hard work convincing our FSC directors that installing Irfanview (the greatest free graphics program you’ll ever need, unless you use a Mac) was a great idea had been negated on two thirds of our computers.  So I tried to download it and install it.

Nope, couldn’t do it.  It just . . . wouldn’t.

I admit, I did not try searching online for how to use the OS.  Instead, I sent a message to the directors of the FSC, saying that I was confused by how the new spiffy Chrome OS worked and asking if maybe we could have a staff training day to help us learn how to use it.  I received an answer that didn’t really address the issue, but also mentioned that they would try to come by in person to talk about it.

They did that the same day.

They didn’t know the answer to my question about how we could install or use other programs either, so they called one of the helpful people at FamilySearch who are available when volunteer staff at FSC’s need assistance.

And we were told that with Chrome OS, the only programs you can install are ones from Google.  And the voice at the other end of the phone began to blandly explain that gee, if you wanted a word processor or a spreadsheet, you could use the handy-dandy ones from Google.

"But wait," I said.  "What about if I want to do graphics work?  Like trimming off all that extra black frame from images downloaded from Ancestry, so the files are cleaner?  Or straightening images that are a little off-kilter?  You know, the kinds of things I can do in Irfanview.  Does Google have a graphics program?"

"Um, er, well, that isn’t something I really know about," said the man at the other end of the phone call.

"Oh, and what if we have a patron who doesn’t already have a family tree program?  We used to have a few different programs installed, so we could show patrons how to use them and even enter some data to give them a quick family tree.  Does Google make a family tree program?  I don’t think they do."

"Um, er, I don’t really know," was again the answer from the man at the other end.

"So how useful are these computers to patrons who come in?  It really seems that they’re just kind of jacked-up Chromebooks if all they can do is browse the Internet."

He didn’t take kindly to that and started explaining how a Chromebook is a very useful computer, and besides, we still have the subscription sites available through the FamilySearch Library portal, so people still have a reason to come in.  At that point, however, I had to leave, as I had errands to run, so I didn't get to hear the end of his bland rationalizations.

FSC’s have already had to return the bulk of their microfilms.  (They wanted us to return all of ours, but I pointed out that not all of it had come originally from the Family History Library to begin with.)  They have been encouraged to get rid of their books (because, well, you know, everything is online).  And now the computers we have available for visitors pretty much only allow you to look at things online.  (Sure, we can install Google Office Suite programs . . . except we haven’t been taught how to do that, so we actually can’t.  Yet.)

I know there are excellent genealogists and family historians at FamilySearch, who know that not everything is online.  But I don't think they’re the people who are making decisions about what is available at FamilySearch Centers.

Many, many FamilySearch Centers across the county (and maybe across the world) have already been closed.  I’m worried that this change is an indication that the rest are doomed and it’s only a matter of time before they close also.  Because if all we can offer visitors is using a subscription site for free, is that enough to encourage people to come in?  Or maybe it will just be easier to pay for the subscription yourself and stay at home, looking things up at 2:00 in the morning in your bunny slippers.  Church members already have access to all or most of the subscription databases at home and rarely come in.  And when we have no more visitors, there will be no reason for us to be there, and our doors will close.

Researching Some Family Photographs

I have written about the digital photo bonanza that I received from my sister and how I have been trying to identify as many of the photos as I can.  I've posted some of them on my blog and asked other family members for assistance in filling in details.  We haven't been doing very well.

One of the photos that has been discussed is this one of my mother standing in front of a red car.

Some of the questions:  What kind of car is that?  (My brother commented that the details on the car are blurry, but that's how the scan looks.  My sister has not weighed in with any comments based on the original.)  Was it my family's car?  Where was this photo taken?  California?  Nevada?  Where are the three of us kids?  (My aunt insisted she can see us in the back seat, but I'm not buying it.)

I went back through the photo scans and discovered three more dated Apr 70 that seem to have been taken around the same time.

My father (photo apparently taken by my mother)

My mother (same clothes), my brother, and the same car

My mother (different clothes) staring off into the distance

After some diligent and focused online searches, the car has now been identified as a 1970 Toyota Crown Station Wagon.  It helped that my father told me in 2017 that we had a 1970 Toyota Station Wagon at one point, but the clincher was finding a press photo from when the 1970 Crown was released.  The details match the car in the first photo exactly.

Of course, some questions remain.  Where were the photos taken?  The picnic table makes it look like some sort of campground.  I remember that we used to go camping occasionally, but I remember almost nothing about the places we went.

Why do my sister and I not appear in the photos?  Are there additional photos from this trip that I haven't run across yet in the files that were sent to me where we do show up?

And since when did my family own a new car?

But I think great progress has been made.

Wordless Wednesday

 

Scars Are Part of Your History and Therefore Your Story

Today is one of those more unusual commemorations:  National Scar Appreciation Day.  It was started in either 2018 or 2019 (information provided differs) by someone named Justine Faeth.  This may or may not be the same person by that name who is an author listed on Amazon with a book titled Chat Love, and/or the Lady Justine Faeth who is on Twitter/X.  It certainly doesn't seem to be a common name.  The pages I found announcing National Scar Appreciation Day didn't say why she started it.

The gist of the day is that instead of just trying to hide our scars, we should acknowledge them for the evidence they show of the struggles we have been through and the fact that we have survived.  Each scar tells a different story from your life, whether an accident, surgery, or whatever, and that you are still here to remember it.  I have a lot of those scars, and they do help tell the story of my life.

Except sometimes there are scars you don't remember the origin of.

I have one of those.  A sizeable scar, about an inch long, on my left forearm.  It's been there as long as I can remember, ever since I was a very young girl.

I remember asking my mother about the scar and how I got it.  And she said, "I don't remember."

I accepted that for years, because I believed my mother.  Until recently, when it dawned on me that there is no way that my mother, who became hysterical at the slightest sight of her children's blood, could possibly have forgotten an incident that gave me a scar so pronounced that it has been with me for just about all of my 62 years.  Because whatever caused this scar, it had to have bled.  It looks like a pretty severe cut.

Which then leads me to wonder, what could have caused that injury that my mother wouldn't want to tell me about it?  Was it something she did?  I don't think it would have been deliberate, but some kind of accident?  Did I fall and cut myself while she had turned her head momentarily?  Did she drop something that hit me?

She's been gone almost 30 years, so I'm not getting the answer from her.  I never thought to ask my father about it, and he's gone now also, for five years.

There are still a few people around who might know:  my sister, my brother, my aunt.  So I'm going to ask them, before I forget or can't.  Because it's very frustrating when you don't know all of your own story.

Happy Birthday, Sydney Opera House!

Today, October 20, 2024, is the 51st anniversary of the opening of the iconic Sydney Opera House.  While my family lived in Australia, the building was coming closer to completion, and we apparently went there one day, because my father took photographs.  Maybe it was an "open to the public day" to get people excited?

I think that's me in the lower left corner.

We left Australia in early 1973 (I really need to find out what day it was and when we arrived back in the United States), several months before the opening and inauguration, and so did not have the opportunity to go inside or attend anything.  According to Wikipedia, in 1973 they were finishing the interiors of the building.  The outside certainly looks pretty finished in my father's photos.

When I visited Australia in 1988 with the USC Marching Band, we went on a tour of the building, which was beautiful.  I'm sure I took photos, but I haven't found any.  And I can't find any 1988 Opera House photos in USCTMB stuff online, just one from the year 2000.  Well, foo.

But this is a photo of the band in Brisbane, where we performed at Expo '88.  I guess that will have to do.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestor Married the Most Times?

Extremes in our family are what we're looking for this week in Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

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

1.  Which ancestor of yours married the most times?  (This may be interesting for some geneabloggers!)

2.  Share about which ancestors married the most times in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

Well, Randy mentioned that there doesn't seem to be a way to easily determine this information from within Family Tree Maker, my family tree database of choice, so I'm going to believe him.  That means I will be working from memory.

I can immediately think of four men in my family tree who were married three times each:  my father, my stepfather, my paternal grandfather, and someone way back on the Sellers line (two of his wives were named Barbara).  My stepfather doesn't really count as an ancestor, and the Sellers man in question is on my informal adoptive line, so that kind of rules them both out.  I would count my grandfather as the most, because in addition to three marriages, for about 17 years he lived with my grandmother as though they were married.

So that means Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903–1995) is probably the winner of this particular sweepstakes.  I don't believe that my aunts from his first marriage considered my grandmother as their stepmother, but they called her Mother Ann.  I know neither they nor my father thought of the second or third wives as stepmothers.  And I'm pretty sure my Aunt Carol did not think of the third and final wife as her stepmother (though I could be wrong about that).  So three marriages, one informal liaison (even though my grandmother used the surname Sellers for the rest of her life), and no stepmothers!

If, however, we were to investigate beyond ancestors and look at collateral relatives, there are additional contenders.  Three of my cousins on my father's side have each been married four times.  One aunt has been married four times.  One of my grandmother's younger brothers had four relationships that produced children (all daughters!); I'm not sure how many times he actually married, however.

But one cousin on my grandmother's long, storied, originally Quaker line was married four times that I have documented, plus he had a child by someone other than his wife while he was still married.  And based on what I have found about him so far, I would not be surprised if there were more marriages and more children.

Now, this is all on my father's side of the family.  On my mother's side, I know of only one cousin and one uncle who have been married three times.

And I'll also thank Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.  This was fun!

35 Years Ago: The Loma Prieta Earthquake

Sometimes you're surprised at how long it has been since a major event that occurred, in this case the Loma Prieta earthquake.  Thirty-five years (!) ago, October 17, 1989, the ground shook in the San Francisco Bay area.  That's more than half my life ago!

I had only been living in Berkeley for three weeks and barely knew my way around.  I was a housekeeper-cook-nanny for a couple with a toddler.  I was the only person at home when everything started shaking.  I had been in two big earthquakes previously in my life (1971 Sylmar and 1987 Whittier Narrows), so I recognized what was going on.

I was living in an old Victorian house that had never been seismically upgraded, plus it had a soft first story, so it shook a lot.  My cat, Tamara (Miss Fuzzy Butt), immediately dove under the bed.  I just braced myself and the small bookcase I had in my room until the shaking stopped.

At that point I walked out of the bedroom to check the rest of the house.  The small living room in front, which I had been told originally was a reception area for the doctor who owned the house, used to have four tall bookcases standing in it.  Now three of them had tipped over, dumping all their books onto the floor.  The fourth had somehow managed to stay upright, but its books were also on the floor.  A good thing that toddler wasn't home!

I tried calling someone on the phone and discovered that there was no dial tone.  But shortly after I hung up the phone, it rang.  Aha!  We were still receiving phone calls!  It was Tom, the husband of the family, wanting to know if I had heard whether his daughter, Sarah, was okay at her daycare.  We decided I would go pick her up from daycare and then get Tom at work.

The first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that my motorcycle had tipped over.  I was lucky that someone was walking down the street at that moment, because I couldn't pick it up by myself.  After setting it upright and putting it back on its side stand, I left in the car to pick up Sarah.

The teachers at the daycare had done a marvelous job with the kids, none of whom acted stressed at all about the earthquake.  It was just another day!  So I collected Sarah, and we went to get her father, who was overjoyed to see her.  Then back to the house we went.

Once there, we discovered that we had since lost power, but at least we had candles, so there was light.  Soon after we returned, Sarah's mother, Sue, got home from work, and she was also fine.  And since we still had working gas, and now a hungry 2 1/2-year-old, I started making dinner.

I think it was while I was in the middle of cooking that the phone rang and then Tom came into the kitchen with a confused look on his face.  "I think it's for you?  Someone who is hysterical?"

My mother had heard about the earthquake and after trying for several hours had finally gotten through on the phone (which, of course, is why they tell people not to call into disaster areas, because the phone lines get jammed and then first responders can't make their needed calls).  And yes, she was hysterical.  Because if she hadn't been able to talk to me on the phone, then I must have died in the earthquake.

I finally convinced her that I was okay.  I then asked her to make a few calls for me, because we still couldn't call out, and went back to making dinner.

Not long after that, Rafael, a friend of Tom and Sue's, came by.  His wife, Stacy, worked in San Francisco and usually came home by BART.  But BART had been shut down as a safety precaution because of the earthquake.  BART between San Francisco and Oakland goes under San Francisco Bay, and they wanted to make sure nothing had happened to the tunnel that could cause any problems.  So Stacy was stuck in San Francisco.

Normally Rafael would have driven over the Bay Bridge to pick her up, but that was impossible, because a section of the top level of the bridge had collapsed during the quake, and the bridge was closed.  Rafael eventually went the long way around the bay — over the Richmond Bridge, through Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and into downtown San Francisco to pick up Stacy, and then all the way back around to bring her home to Berkeley.

Over the next few days we learned that the upper deck of the Cypress Freeway, a two-level structure in the East Bay, had collapsed, trapping and killing many people in their cars.  The Marina District in San Francisco had suffered from liquefaction and many houses had collapsed (amazingly, the same way they had done during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but people had rebuilt in the same place).  The worst damage was actually in Santa Cruz, which was very close to the earthquake's epicenter.  But all you heard about on TV was San Francisco and the fact that the quake interrupted the World Series game that evening.

Bay Bridge collapse, October 1989
by C. E. Mayer

Celebrating Mary Lou

This year to celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife; I'm still convinced that some language must have a one-word term for this), we have a two-person guest post!  My sister and my nephew each wrote something about Mary Lou.

-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --

On November 13, 1976, my mother became a first-time grandmother to my son, Joel, and my 4-year-old sister, Shanyn, became an aunt.  Shortly after Joel’s birth, my parents moved to Virginia and then to Florida.

In the summer of 1983 Shanyn started spending part of the summer with us in Pennsylvania.  A few years later, Joel started making the return trip with Shanyn and visited for a few weeks to a month in Florida.

It was great fun for Joel, but I was always worrying that they were getting into mischief at Grandma’s instigation!

Of course, as Joel got older the visits were not as frequent, but my mother would tell anyone who would listen how proud she was of Joel’s military service and that he had given her the new title of great-grandmother, with the births of his sons Zachary and Connor.

In observation of Mary Lou’s birthday on October 16, I asked Joel if he could write a Grandma memory.

===

I remember getting up at the wee hours of the morning to go fishing.  My grandmother, an insomniac, was already awake and vacuuming when the alarm went off.  There were several steps in the fishing process, first stopping so she could fill up her massive cup of Diet Rite cola at the convenience store.

Sand flea (Talitrus saltator) ,
by Arnold Paul / edit by Waugsberg
 - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5

Instead of buying bait, we would catch it.  If we were fishing off of a pier then she had a cast net to grab some wayward mullet.  Mission complete, I thought, we had caught some fish!  If we were surf casting then she had a makeshift sand flea trap made from the remnants of an appropriated street sign and some chicken wire.  The trap went into the sand as the surf retreated to catch the little crustaceans.

Not long after the sun came up we would be headed back to the house.  There were always porpoises breaching in the intercoastal along the causeway.  Grandma James would look at the red and white smoke stacks of the power plants as her daily vision check.

I wasn’t much for the fishy part, but I enjoyed the time with my grandmother, who never met a stranger.  Oh, the stories!

— Joel Kent III

===

Mary Lou (Bowen) Sellers James would have been 86 today.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Baby Boy Brainin

Stillborn, January 1, 1915

Manhattan, New York County, New York

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Share Something Unexpected That You've Found While Researching an Ancestor

As for Randy Seaver's topic for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, if a genealogist has never found something unexpected while researching an ancestor, I'd say that genealogist hasn't done enough research.

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

1.  Share something unexpected that you've found while researching an ancestor.

2.  Share about your unexpected something in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

One major fact that I discovered wasn't quite unexpected, so I guess you could say I merely confirmed it.

I was told by my cousin Ruth Anne that the rumor in the family was that my paternal grandparents had never actually been married.  This was strongly supported by a letter she had that was from a lawyer, in response to an inquiry my grandmother (who was also Ruth Anne's grandmother) had sent to him.  It was clear from the letter we had that our grandmother had asked about circumstances relating to a common-law marriage.  Now, that is not something you ask if you know that you signed a marriage license.

But the confirmation that they had not been married came when Ancestry.com added a database of an index to Florida divorces.

I was sitting around in an airport during a layover and discovered the database.  I figured it would be amusing to look up my father's and my grandfather's divorces.  And lo and behold, when my grandfather was divorced in 1953, it was from Elizabeth, his first wife, whom he married in the 1920's — not from Anna, my grandmother.  My father was born in 1935.  Oops!

So I called my father and said, "Guess what?  You're a bastard!"  Which he thought was hilarious.

(And yes, I realize that the possibility exists that my grandfather could have told my grandmother he wasn't married and entered into a bigamous marriage, but they lived in a pretty small town, and I'll bet that my grandmother knew his first wife and knew that he was still married.)

I did discover something unexpected about my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, however.

I had been told by cousins that my great-great-grandmother had died while the family was still in Europe and that my great-great-grandfather had remarried, which made sense, because they had very young children when she passed away.  It's certainly common for men to do that, so they have a wife to take care of those children.

I found the record for my great-great-grandmother's death on December 8, 1908.  But when I found an index entry for my great-great-grandfather's second marriage, I learned that it had taken place June 8, 1911, two and a half years after my great-great-grandmother had died.

Um, say what?  You mean to tell me that he took care of those babies (including one who was a mere one month old when mom died) all by himself for those years?

So I asked my cousins about this apparent "modern man", taking on the mantle of mother while he was also a businessman.

And learned that no, he had not been the one taking care of the children.  The oldest daughter in the family, who was about 18 when her mother died, was still living at home, and she was the person taking care of those little ones.  My great-great-grandfather only remarried after Etta married and moved out.  While that's not quite what I was told the first time around, it certainly made that second marriage date make much more sense.

Have You Ever Baked an Angel Food Cake?

Today is National Angel Food Cake Day!  What, you haven't heard of it?  No, really, I don't make these things up.  See, it's right here and here.

I decided to post for the day because way back when I was just 7 or 8 years old, I made an angel food cake from scratch, and it turned out perfectly.

I don't remember why I wanted to make an angel food cake.  My best guess is that I fixated on the word "angel", but it's just a guess.  At this point, all I remember is that I wanted to make it.

My mother was generally very supportive when one of us kids wanted to do something, and this time was no different.  I don't recall if I needed her to help, but I don't think so, because, well, she wasn't very domestically inclined to begin with, and I can't think of a single time she baked any cakes herself.  But she may have helped me read the recipe instructions and figure out what they meant.

I definitely don't remember how I whipped the eggs.  There's no way I did that by hand.  Maybe we had a hand mixer.

So there are many details I don't recall.  But I do remember that it turned out as it was supposed to, and everyone liked it.

And then my mother told me how difficult it was to make an angel food cake and have it turn out right.

So I decided to rest on my laurels and didn't try to make one again for about 20 years.  And then I did it from a mix.

Wordless Wednesday

 

Wordless Wednesday