With the death of two music icons recently, I’ve seen this image floating around the internet. It imagines David Bowie and Prince as the Little Prince. For those looking for the origins of the image, here’s the information in one place.
The Bowie side is a modification of Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s depiction of David Bowie as the Little Prince, created shortly after his death. Click the link to go to the original. The image is linked to his Facebook post.
Jarrett J. Krosoczka
The Prince side is a modification of Sean Gregory Miller’s image from a couple years ago. The image is linked to the original on DeviantArt.
Sean Gregory Miller
Images copyright by the artists and included here in small sizes only to provide enough visual idea to identify the pieces.
Because I research descendants of my ancestors, I get to learn about a lot more jurisdictions than I would were I to be researching ancestry only. My first cousin three times removed, Clara Josten, married an Alfred C. Jaquith. He was a businessman, and operated in Merrill Wisconsin, Des Moines Iowa, Dubuque Iowa, and Denver Colorado at various times. The Denver Public Library has an index of obituaries that appeared in the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, so I knew that Alfred died in late September 1927. I haven’t actually looked up those obituaries yet, and I assumed he’d died in or around Denver.
It’s the same Alfred Jaquith. While I can’t read Spanish, there are references to Clara Kuchenberg (Clara’s step-father was Mathias Kuchenberg), Denver, and the dates match up with the obituary index.
So now I’m going to have to start learning a bit about Mexican genealogy records.
Header image Cathedral taken by Jeff Kramer (CC By).
I’ve seen this on a couple other genealogy blogs recently, and for once a meme has piqued my interest. The idea is to take a pedigree chart and color code the people in it by place of birth. The following is mine. Note that this is not the extent of my known pedigree; it’s the part where I’ve documented birth places.
Legend
Mine is all over the map. After coming to America, most of my family didn’t stay long in one place before moving on for more opportunity. Sweden, Wisconsin, and Washington are the places with the largest number of people. Not surprisingly, those are the areas I’m most familiar with researching.
Additionally, all my German ancestors immigrated before German unification. They came from countries like the Kingdom of Hanover, Bavaria, and Prussia, which is more complex research than Denmark or Sweden. Each of those states that became part of the German empire recorded information differently. A couple of relatives were born in the Province of Canada, that short-lived colony that predated Ontario.
With this many places, a genealogist has to become familiar with a lot of locations. In some ways, I envy people whose families stayed in one area for generations. On the other hand, I get a much greater variety of stories.
I started working on my family history in 2010 at the request of my grandparents. I poked around for a while at my father’s side of the family. No one alive knew about our history before my great grandfather, Joseph Weiss. His father, Anton Weiss, died in 1910, and his mother, Clara Voigt, died in 1915. She had moved to California to reside with her children there.
That was family that none of us knew about any more.
I researched Anton and then began working on his descendants. Through that work and a little bit of serendipity, I got in contact with Anne Falconer. She is a great grandchild of Anton and Clara. Because Clara had gone to live with the California children, Anne had her photo album.
After emailing a few times, Anne very kindly made copies of the photos and mailed them to me. She even sent a 150 year old print of a photo of Joseph Weiss as a very young boy. The photos she sent were the first visual depiction of many of my family that I’d ever seen. The following was taken at Anton and Clara’s 50th wedding anniversary.
Anton and Clara Weiss 50th wedding anniversary
I was browsing Find A Grave this morning and came across a memorial for Anne. She died a year ago. I never met her, but she was a help and inspiration for me early on in this pastime.
Newspapers didn’t always have pretensions to be objective. In the 1800s, they were often small operations. They printed mostly gossip. They were explicitly Democratic or Republican and received support from their party. In smaller cities, they were extensions of the publisher, who also served as editor and reporter as well. A newspaper was much like a blog today as far as its personality, including feuding.
In the 1880s, Springfield Illinois had two main newspapers, the Illinois State Journal and the Illinois State Register, as well as Sangamo Monitor. They were not friends.
From the Illinois State Journal, 11 July 1881, page 6:
Scooped.
With fiendish glee the Register and Monitor yesterday morning announced the death of Coleman Woods, the colored man who was sun-struck Wednesday. — Journal.
Just so: and the lazy Journal reporters would have made the same announcement, if they had been abroad, in search of news. They were safely housed, however, compiling from an old almanac the “best methods of preventing sun-stroke” and did not encounter the report of Wood’s death, which was prevalent throughout the city, and which was generally believe until the next day. Indolence is not always without its compensations, as is manifested in this case — Register.
“Just so” and if the over-enterprising reporters for the Register, who fiendishly declared that live men are dead, “had been abroad in search of news,” instead of remaining “housed up” in the effort to frame the above lame defense of an utterly indefensible action, they might have announced the three cases of sunstroke which occurred on Friday; the fact that two men were overcome by poisonous gases in the Court House well on the same day, and they also might have given a history of the operations of the counterfeiters, sentenced to the penitentiary by Judge Treat. Or if they had not been “housed up” Saturday, they might have been able to announce the interesting decision given by Judge Zane in the German American Savings, Loan & Building Association litigation, which the Journal presents this morning. “They were safely housed up, however,” and were consequently “scooped” by “the lazy Journal reporters,” just as they are again this morning. The fact of the matter is that the Journal is continually “scooping” its cotempories. The Journal is not afflicted with toadyism; it does not deal in “Personal and other Reflections,” but eschews personalities for the sake of legitimate news.
3 Ways to Tell if Your Distaste For Hillary Clinton is Sexist
Implicit messages are more insidious because they are consumed and deployed beyond the realm of consciousness. We need not think deeply to identify the racism in Donald Trump’s depiction of Mexican immigrants as rapists or the sexism of his asking if Megyn Kelly’s tough questions were due to her being on her period. Identifying subtler racist and sexist cues is more challenging, however, because no one is immune to these subtleties, even those among us who have engaged in personal and public anti-racist and anti-sexist work.
Recently, while tracking down the family of my great great grandmother, Maria Hein (Mrs. William Solle), I looked into her sister, Mrs. Anna Helfer.
On 9 Sep 1887, a Philip Halfer committed suicide in Springfield. The next day, both the Illinois State Journal and the Illinois State Register ran lengthy news reports on his death. I’ll write another post later about the circumstances of the suicide. However, there were two pieces of information in the Journal’s report that compel me to write before I’ve completed much additional work.
The Journal’s report does not give Mrs. Halfer’s name. She is merely referred to as Mrs. Halfer. But it does say she is a sister of Mr. Charles Warner of East Springfield. Emilia Kibele’s obituary lists her siblings, including Mrs. William Solle, Mr. Charles Werner, and Mrs. Anna Helfer. It appears that suicidal Philip Halfer is the husband of my 3rd great aunt, Anna Hein. I love it when I can piece things together and make a connection.
The second intriguing things was the item title: “Philip Hartman Finds Rest”. Throughout the article, the text refers to Philip Halfer. Philip Hartman sounded odd, but sometimes Springfield newspapers of the time were sloppy with spelling. Indeed, every other record gives the surname Helfer rather than Halfer, and his grave marker spells his first name as Philipp. Perhaps the paper was even sloppier than I thought. However, I didn’t completely read the article because the quality of the microfilm scan degrades toward unreadable the further down the page one goes. But it isn’t all unreadable:
While contemplating suicide the day before his death he told Mr. John T Rhodes that his real name was Hartman and not Halfer.
Now that’s an intriguing tidbit! I’ve already got my great grandfather’s unexplained name from Öman to Hallin and the mystery switch of Mary Evelyn Sorenson to Frances Marie Newton. Now I can add the mystery of Philip Hartman to Philip Halfer. (More on the spellings later…)
In my Voigt family tree, I have a second cousin twice removed named Charles William Teasdale. He was born in 1896 in Cassville, Wisconsin, the town my great great grandfather Anton Weiss lived in, and grew up there until the early 1910s. In 1913 his mother Clara Voigt died, and in 1914 his father Alonzo B. Teasdale died. Charles and his brother Harold made their way to the Chicago area, where Charles married Mae Alice Vonasek in 1920, whose father had also died while she was young.
Charles became involved in an evangelical church as well, and this is where the genealogy gets interesting. In 1924, Charles and Mae went to Kijabe in the British Kenya Colony and became missionaries. The key records for many of my relatives are census records. Not so with the Teasdales. Their missionary work kept them out of the U.S. during the 1930 and 1940 U.S. Censuses. However, they left a long trail of migration records with frequent exits from the U.S., transit through the United Kingdom, returns to the U.S., and even one stop in Brazil.
In 1924, the first left Oak Park, Illinois for Kenya, traveling via New York and Southampton, England. They returned in 1931 with one child, traveling through Bremen, Germany and re-entering the U.S. at New York.
1924 Southampton passenger arrival manifest
In 1933, they again left Oak Park for Kenya. They also traveled through Southampton, England on their way to British East Africa. The family returned in 1938 via Le Havre, France, this time with two additional children.
They only stayed until 1940, when they again went to Kenya. This time they traveled via Rio de Janero, I assume in part because World War II made travel through Europe too dangerous. The Brazilian records for their 6 day stay in Rio included the passport photos used at the top of this post.
In 1947, they came back to the U.S. again. This time they embarked in Mombasa, British East Africa and sailed directly to New York City on the Great Falls Victory cargo ship.
Great Falls Victory
The pair left again in 1949, this time traveling back to Kijabe through Southampton, England back. They returned in 1955, flyinf Pan American Airlines from London.
And in 1957 they left the U.S. for Kenya for at least the 5th time.
U.S. and U.K. passenger manifests after about 1960 are not public, so I don’t know how many more times they passed through our borders. Nowadays international travel is much more common, but back then it was rare. This currently the largest amount of travel records I’ve got for one couple in my family tree.
Mae Vonasek Teasdale died in Kijabe in 1970 and is buried in the cemetery nearby. Charles remarried in 1972 before retiring to a retired missionaries community in Florida where he died in 1985. I haven’t read up on the Africa Inland Mission in Kijabe, so I don’t know how integral the Teasdale’s were to their work, but they obviously spent a lot of time there. At least two of Charles children became missionaries, and there are several more generations after them. As some of them are alive, I’ve not written any identifying information about them.
When I first started recording sources, I didn’t understand the citation/source/repository model that is the basis for a lot of genealogy programs. I struggled to record a marker as the source for dates of birth and death. I sometimes recorded the marker itself as an individual source, but that quickly results in many entries in the source list. I also tried using myself as the source, when I personally canvassed the cemetery and recorded the grave markers. But logically, that’s incorrect because I am not the entity with the knowledge. I am a secondary source, and the original is available.
When citing cemetery records you will greatly reduce the length of
your Source List if you cite the facility as the author (creator) of the
records, rather than use the gravestone or the record book as the lead
element in a Source List Entry.
That paragraph was a revelation to me. Now I have a series of sources such as “Washington, Seattle, Calvary Cemetery grave markers” in my Gramps database. This works great. For each citation linked to the source, it’s clear that the source(s) are the grave markers themselves. As a practical matter, I’ll rarely know who the informant was for the grave markers, so this is going to be as far as I can go in the chain.
However, when Ms. Shown Mills gets to online databases of burials, her recommendation changes. In that case, she recommends using the creator and web site as the source list entry.
I don’t think that always works so well for my database, and I’m experimenting with switching my database to her recommendation in the paragraph above. When an online source has photographs of the grave markers, I’m still using the grave markers as my source, not the web site.
In fact, what the web site says could be completely wrong while the photo included is correct. On Find a Grave, it’s common for people to add additional information not found on the marker. It’s common for memorial managers to change the listed information when they think they have better source. Older grave markers often have incorrect dates of birth, and memorial managers sometimes put the correct date rather than the date on the marker. I think I want to have separate citations for the information in the memorial and the information drawn from the markers.
For the information on the markers themselves, what I am trying now are citations to the cemeteries, attaching the images of markers to those citations, and sourcing each image to the Find a Grave memorial (or whatever web site/database it came from). Basically, creating a chain of citations. Anyone using my database can trace the information to the web site; that is not lost.
Some side thoughts to this experiment:
This is for recording in my database, not for publication. For a published article, I would cite as Evidence Explained recommends. If someone wanted me to write an article for them. Which no one does, at least not yet.
I use Gramps as my genealogy database. In Gramps, citations are first class objects, meaning they can be used multiple times in support of multiple facts. In GEDCOM and many other genealogy database programs, one citation supports a single fact. To support another fact, a second citation with exactly the same information is created. My model above may not fit the data models provided by programs other than Gramps.
This makes me wish Gramps and other programs had support for chains of citations. The only reason this works at all in Gramps is that media can have source citations. If I don’t have separate media, I cannot cleanly model this in Gramps.
I checked Tony Proctor’s experimental STEMMA genealogy model to see if he thought of this. Unsurprisingly, STEMMA provides for chains of citations. I hope Mr. Proctor can get some of this into FHISO standards and those are actually adopted by software vendors.
I’m still mulling over some thoughts on using Find A Grave and the photos there as sources for the burial location itself. Expect another post on that… sometime. I need to try some things out.
A few weeks ago I found a record in an Ancestry database that indicated my relative Mary Evelyn Sorenson may have gone by Frances Marie Newton after moving to California from Wisconsin. (Mary Evelyn Sorenson, part 2)
I requested Frances Newton’s death certificate and got my copy recently.
Frances Marie Newton death certificate
Sadly, the record held almost no useful information for me.
Name of father: unknown
Birth place of father: unknown
Name of mother: unknown
Birth place of mother: unknown
Social Security Number: unknown
Name of surviving spouse: –
Usual occupation: unknown
Usual kind of business: unknown
Usual employer: unknown
Years in occupation: unknown
I hoped mostly to find a husband’s name for further research, or parent’s names to definitely connect Frances Newton with Mary Sorenson.
The death certificate may yet prove useful, but it didn’t provide much useful right off the bat.
