Posted in 1890 Russell Co, KY, Military on June 15, 2009 |
Woolridge, John – 5 Ky. Cav.
Martha M widow of Smith, William * – 3 Ky. Inft.
Dunbar, Lafayette – 5 Ky. Cav.
Ellender S widow of Stephens, Welcome – 12 Ky. Inft.
Emily widow of Dunbar, Reuben P. – 3 Ky. Inft.
Coffey, John W – blank
Wilson, Wesley – 13 Ky. Cav.
Holder, Jeremiah C – 13 Ky. Cav.
Stephens, Andrew J – 13 Ky. Cav.
Betsy widow of Noles, Jackson – blank
Wills, David – 3 Ky. Inft.
Posted in Organization, Photography on June 13, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In my continuing effort to preserve my Grandmother’s negatives, I’ve learned a few things that I thought might be helpful to other genealogists.
When I was first given the negatives, my goal was to find a way to see what was on the negatives in order to see which would be the most useful to have printed. Because the negatives were not 35mm film, I was having a hard time thinking of an “easy” way to see the negatives. I could hold the negatives up to the window and because a good portion of the negatives were of photos I’ve seen in family photo albums, I could tell who the subject of those photos were. I was most interested in the older, black and white negatives. Some of those negatives were from before my grandparents had children and I was pretty certain that some were of photos that my family has never seen before.
After researching negative scanners and finding none that would scan the format of negatives I was looking at, I decided to try scanning the negatives without any attachment. I figured that at the very least, the negatives would be larger on my screen and easier to see. Then, my daughter showed me how to invert the colors on the negatives to see the actual picture. I was thrilled! But some of the photos were too scratched to get a good image from.
My grandmother - scanned negative
I could tell that this image was my grandmother as a teenage, and I was incredibly disappointed that this photo did not turn out. Later that evening, I was sorting the negatives into photo album pages to try to get them organized so that I could quit shuffling them around and damaging them further. To see the images, I was holding them up to my computer screen with a blank page in Microsoft Word. I was telling my son about my problems with the negatives and how I thought they’d scan better if I could get light from BEHIND the negative instead of front as the scanner was doing. I asked him if he thought it would work for me to use my digital camera to take a picture of the negative taped to my computer screen and we decided to give it a try. What a difference!
Vesper - digital image of the negative
I did a test run of a couple of negatives and then noticed that some of the photos had a pattern imbedded in them. They almost looked like the photos were taken through a window screen. I realized that the pattern was the texture of my computer screen! I gave up for the night, but couldn’t stop thinking about how I could fix this. I thought I could put a sheet of white paper behind the negative before taking the photo, but I could not find any white paper that was truly white. The mottled appearance of the paper (only visible when held up to light) made the negatives look dirty and spotted. So I decided to gently tape the negatives to my window, which worked great for getting rid of the texture, but there was a color variation in the images that I figured out was my camera seeing sky above trees above grass through the negative. Not something I could notice when looking at the negative on my camera display, but certainly noticeable in the inverted image. After some trial and error, I ended up stretching a white sheet in front of my window to take care of the background issues. I used the macro lens on my camera with no flash and was quite happy with the results! My lens was approximately 2 inches from the negative.
Final version - a little touchup with Photoshop
Here are some other things I learned:
So originally, my goal was simply to identify which negatives to have developed and I ended up with over 100 great digital images that are ready to print from my own photo printer! Many negatives were not scanned because I could tell they would not be useful in the lines I am researching (alot of my uncle’s buddies in the Navy), but I can always go back and get them later if needed. And I did not even try to work with the color negatives. Perhaps this winter when everything outside is already white!
With my digital negatives, I can zoom in on faces or crop the photo to be any convenient size, insert them into notes or family tree charts – all for free! The bonus is that the negatives are digitally and physically preserved with the digital copies stored in various places. My family will all be getting a CD burned with all of the final images – which I hope will bring out lots of forgotten family stories and mementos to be shared at the next family reunion. I plan to include a list of items that THEY may not think is helpful to my research, but that I’d love to see!
And to think, this all started with my Uncle telling me, “I really don’t have that much for your genealogy project”!
Posted in 1890 Russell Co, KY, Military on June 13, 2009 |
Vina widow of Polston, Joseph – 8 Ky. Cav.
Sarah widow of McFall, George W. – 5 Ky. Cav.
Bernard, Silas R. – blank
Sarah E. widow of Absher, Austin – 3 Ky. Inft.
Martha A. widow of Hopper, William – blank
Eliza J widow of Russel George S. – 8 Ky. Cav.
Wilson, Benjamin – 5 Ky. Cav.
Popplewell, Geo H – 3 Ky. Inft.
Kinnet, Ephriam M – 13 Ky. Cav.
Herriford, George W – 13 Ky. Cav.
Amanda J widow of Brummett, John S. – 3 Ky. Inft.
McWilliams, John C. – 45 Penn. Inft.
Dunbar, Logan – 13 Ky. Cav.
Clemency widow of Rexroat, Joseph A – 3 Ky. Inft.
Meadows, Andrew – 5 Ky. Cav.
Poplewell, Richard – 3 Ky. Inf.
Delila widow of Conn, Martin – 5 Ky. Cav.
Blankenship, Jeffers – 13 Ky. Cav.
Elizabeth widow of Coleman, James – 5 Ky. Cav.
Falkenburg, Elias D. – 2 Wis. Cav.
Posted in 1890 Russell Co, KY, Military on June 12, 2009 |
Darnil, John M. – 13 Ky Inft.
Burton, Charles – 13 Ky. Inft.
Reau, Joseph C – 13 Ky. Cav.
McElroy, John F. – 13 Ky. Cav.
Calicott, Wade – 5 Ky. Cav.
Shaw, James T. – 7 Tenn ??
Grider, Wesley – 5 Ky. Cav.
Grider, Cyrus – 13 Ky. Cav.
Elizabeth widow of ?, Charles T – 13 Ky. Cav.
Hale, Marshal H. – 5 Ky. Cav.
Hale, Frances – 13 Ky. Cav.
Sullivan, Henry C. – 12 Ky. Inft.
Coffey, John A – blank
Smith, James A – 13 Ky. Cav.
Sarah A widow of Patterson, Andrew – blank
Phelps, John – 13 Ky. Cav.
Dunbar, Bryant – 12 Ky. Inft.
Eliza J widow of Zimmerman, James or Jacob – blank
Blankenship, Jackson – 107 ??
Woldridge, Frances M – 3 Ky. Inf.
Posted in Indiana, Johnson County, Organization, Russell County Smiths, Surname: Scott on June 10, 2009 |
Before...
After!
I’ve known for a long time that if I have a “techie” computer question, I can always ask my kids. Especially my 2nd son who is in college studying graphic design and seems to have ALL of the latest computer goodies and programs out there. So after spending a couple of hours looking through negatives today and separating black and white negatives (older) from color negatives, I took a shot and asked my son if he knew of a program that would take my scanned negative and turn it into a digital image. He said he couldn’t think of any.
That’s when my 13 year old daughter piped up, “you mean like this?” and took my laptop. 30 seconds later, I had a great digital image! I think this may be my great-grandmother, Mintie Scott Smith. I was overwhelmed! She used an online site called Picnik.com. She said she uses it alot to add interesting effects to photos before she puts them on her Facebook page. With one click of the “invert” button, she turned my negative into a photo! So that got me to wondering if there was a similar button on my Adobe Photoshop program and there is!
At this very moment, she is scanning all of the black and white negatives that I had pulled out earlier today. There are a couple of hundred photos that are black and white. Based on a couple of test runs, I can see that some of the negatives are too scratched to be converted, but I’m hopeful that the majority of them will be good. She says that it should also work with color negatives, so I’ll be anxious to give that a try!
Posted in Wordless Wednesday on June 10, 2009 |
Well, I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I recently “inherited” all of the negatives that were my grandmother’s. It doesn’t look like she ever threw any of them away (just like me!) so there’s QUITE a collection! The majority of the negatives came from her Hawkeye Brownie camera, so they are not a standard size. I was having quite a dilemma over what to do with them. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was going to have a massive headache from trying to look at them by holding them up to the light. And in all of the research that I did on negative scanners, I could only find information for scanners that did slides or 35mm film. So this is my solution for now.
I’m taking the most interesting negatives (the ones that are black and white and are not obvious to me as to identification) and scanning them. Then, I can make them as large as my screen and I can play with the brightness levels to make them as “readable” as possible without actually developing them. I’m going to put them into a slide show of sorts to show my aunts and uncles along with any hints my grandmother left – such as labels on the envelopes, etc. I’ve included an example above. My mother does not recognize this house or can even think of where it might be so the woman is a mystery. This negative is included in a set of negatives of my great-uncle at his military base, so I’m estimating the year to be around 1942 when he would have been 20 years old.
My next decision is to decide how I’m going to preserve these negatives. All of my negatives are in archival negative sleeves from Light Impressions, but Grandma’s negatives would not fit in standard negative sleeves. My sleeves are in chronological order in 2 large binders with labels on each page. I’ve always thought that those would be a salvation for my soul if I ever lost my photo albums to fire or tornado. Of course, it would probably work out alot better if I didn’t have them stored in the same location as my albums! Better put “take negatives to Mom’s house” to my summer “to do” list!
Posted in 1890 Russell Co, KY, Military on June 10, 2009 |
Here is the next installment of the 1890 Special Census for Veterans and their Widows. For some reason, I did not alphabetize these names and I’d rather go ahead and get them posted than to take the time to get the names into the right format and then alphabetize them. The file that I have is in “ready to print” format with headers and such and alphabetizing the names will have to go into my “to do on a rainy day” list. Anyway, I tend to put things off unless they can be “perfect” and that usually leads to not doing the thing at all. All of the precincts are alphabetized except for the 2 Jamestown precincts – the 2 largest precincts. So I’m just going to go ahead an post in sets of 20. If you are searching for a specific name, I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Feel free to leave me a comment if you’d like for me to look for someone in particular.
Wilson, John – 13 Ky. Cav
Bolin, Henry C. – 3 Ky. Inft.
Jane widow of Edmonds, Benj. F. – 1 Ky. Cav.
Coffey, Shelby – 1 Ky. Cav.
Mary Paaigan Widow of Coffey, John A. – 3 Ky. Cav.
Ann E Widow of Bolin, John – 3 Ky. Inft.
Riggins, William D. – 1 Ky. (Eng?)
Smith, John P – 13 Ky. Cav.
Ferry, Daniel S. – 1 Ky. Cav.
Wilson, William H. – Ohio Inf.
Wilson, **untain F. – 8 Tenn. Inft.
Hail, John C. – 13 Ky. Cav.
Kimble, George A – 13 Ky. Cav.
Wilson, Daniel – 13 Ky. Cav.
Wilson, Alexander S. – 13 Ky. Cav.
McElroy, William B. – 13 Ky. Inft.
McElroy, Francis – 13 Ky. Cav.
Miller, Asure – 13 Ky. Cav.
Grider, Charles – 5 Ky. Cav.
Kickson, William * – blank
Posted in Douglas County, Illinois, Madness Monday on June 8, 2009 |
Henry and Mary VonLanken and family 1905
I recently signed up to attend the 2009 National Palatines to America Conference at the Allen County Public Library. While I have not taken any of my own actively researched lines back to immigration, every SINGLE line of my husband’s side came from Germany. I have done quite a bit of research on a French/German Alsace line that my husband has, but my lack of knowledge about ANYTHING German has kept me from researching his lines further. I decided that I’d better take some time to make sure that I have all relevant information organized and cited to make the most use of my research time there.
As I’ve been putting together timeline format notes for all of the VonLanken line, I’ve become quite frustrated over the lack of an 1880 census for this family. They arrived in New York on Mar. 30, 1870 and I have the 1870 census and the 1900 census, but I cannot find the 1880 census. The VonLanken family seems to have gone directly from the ship to Douglas County, Illinois and every single life event for this family is found there right up to burial. So why can’t I find the 1880 census? The fact that the 1890 census doesn’t exist means that I have a 30 year gap between census information, which really irritates me! (I suppose in the grand scheme of genealogy research, this is a tiny thing, but the type A personality in me is really steamed!)
In the 1870 census, Henry and his family lived next door to another VonLanken family. I have no idea of the relationship, but I think it could be key in taking this line back further.
1870 Douglas County, Illinois
In 1881, Henry VonLanken married Mary Heit in Douglas County. 7 children were born to them between 1882 and 1900. Two additional children were born after 1900 census. The picture at the top of the page of Henry and Mary’s family was taken around 1905. The young man in the back row on the left end is my husband’s great-grandfather, George VonLanken. The family continued to grow, as evidenced in the following picture. My husband’s grandfather, Ervin, is seated in front on the floor in a white shirt.
Henry VonLanken family around 1916
Posted in Indiana, Russell County Smiths, Russell County, Kentucky, Saturday Night Fun, Surname: Scott on June 6, 2009 |
Saturday Night Genealogy Fun for this week is to find your ancestors in 1909! I used the 1910 census and found each of my living great and great-great-grandparents. I only had 1 living grandparent and he is listed with his parents. I had never noticed before the number of Russell County relatives that lived on the same road!
Posted in Indiana, Johnson County, tagged Bennett, family history, genealogy, Johnson County Indiana, Smith on June 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I’ve returned from my research trip to southern Indiana and I’m very pleased with the amount of information I gathered! In all of the years of my research, I’ve never taken alot of time to find actual sources for my closest generations – my parents and grandparents. I could always get that stuff later – right? Wrong! My grandmother passed away in 1999 and my aunts and uncles have never concerned themselves with gathering family information. (“What do you want to know THAT for?”)
In recent weeks, I’ve been working on adding citations to all of my group sheets and notes for my mother’s family. It didn’t take me long to figure out the I had an awful lot of sources where I could only cite “that’s what Grandma told me”! So I set out to find the sources to go along with the information she gave to me. Ancestry has been a huge help in finding birth and death indexes for Kentucky. The Allen County Public Library has an excellent selection of books and microfilms for Russell County, Kentucky, so there were many things I found that way. But alot of items that I needed were too recent to be available online. Thank heavens for the Johnson County Historical Museum! http://www.johnsoncountymuseum.org/home It never occurred to me that a historical museum might have a genealogy research room and because my family has only been in the Johnson County area since 1935, I had never spent alot of time looking for sources there.
The Museum itself has a lovely area with displays from several time periods with actual artifacts from that time. A lifesized conastoga wagon, Civil War display, Victorian era display, right through recent military artifacts. It was fun to go there with my Mom and to look at the displays from the 1950′s! There was a display of the local candy kitchen (Nick’s Candy Kitchen) that all of the teens hung out in while my Mom was in high school. They even had one of the booths from the restaurant and my mother recognized some of the graffiti carved into the wall! She recognized the specific popcorn machine from the Artcraft movie theater and was telling me about the “popcorn lady” who always worked there when we noticed all of the pictures on the wall of the popcorn lady herself! Memories came rolling forth as she walked through the displays.
We went downstairs to the genealogy research room and I was amazed to see hundreds of courthouse books lining the walls! The staff was incredibly helpful – perhaps a bit too helpful! I knew that I wanted to find the marriage record for my grandparents in 1935. The worker looked the information up in a computer generated index and in no time at all, had the correct book open to the correct page for me. (As an interesting side note, perhaps this is normal procedure, but I thought it was wonderful that there were huge bottles of hand sanitizer all around the room with signs for patrons to clean their hands before handling the books.) I asked if it was ok for me to take pictures of the page with my digital camera and she told me that was fine. She asked if I wanted to see the marriage application as well – something I was not expecting to find – and of course, I said yes! While I was getting my camera out of my bag along with the notes I had made of the additional information I wanted to look for, the worker assumed I was finished and began putting the books away! I asked her to find them again, and I quickly took pictures of the pages. While I was taking those photos, she asked if I’d like a photocopy of the marriage certificate (again, I never dreamed I’d find so much!) and I obviously told her that I would! Needless to say, I was overwhelmed with the help that I was receiving. After I was finished with the marriage records, I asked if she could help me find ANY military information for my grandfather and we tried several things. She even got on the phone to the state archives and found a person who gave me some great ideas to follow up on.
As an afterthought, I asked if she could tell me the date for my grandparents’ divorce around 1965. She found the date in the index, but the records were so “recent” that I had to go down the block to the courthouse to have copies made from the microfilm. So I’m proud to say that this week, I visited my first courthouse for genealogy information! Not alot of research involved, but I did get the date and paperwork for my grandparents’ divorce, an irritating blank I’ve had in my notes for a long time. After the courthouse, my mother took me on a tour of the town and I took pictures of the houses they had grown up in and the brick roads that my great-grandfather had worked on for the WPA.
That evening, as I was transferring the photos from my camera to my laptop, I realized that I had not written down a single bit of information for a source citation from the museum because everything was brought out and put away so quickly! AND, when taking photos of the marriage application, I had not realized there was a page for the groom and a page for the bride. I had only taken a picture of the bride side. I had already planned to return to town the next day to visit my Uncle, so I told my mother we’d need to go early and return to the museum. It was a different worker this time, so instead of getting out the actual books, he handed me the index and as I was looking up the marriage information, I noticed that my grandparents were listed twice in 2 different books! He helped me get out all of the books and this time, I found an additional marriage record where my grandparents had gone back a month later to confirm that the marriage had actually taken place! He not only made photo copies of everything for me, he made several copies until he had the record centered on the paper and lined up nicely, but only charged for the final copies! So I had gone to the museum, hoping to find a register listing my grandparents to confirm the date and I ended up with a marriage application, marriage permit, marriage certificate and marriage record! I also got the divorce decree and agreement for my grandparents and found an index of civil court files with 4 mentions for my great-grandfather. That will be my starting point on my next trip!
As an added bonus – after years of my aunts and uncles telling me that they had nothing – I discovered that my uncle had the funeral card AND obituary for my grandfather – something my mother didn’t even have! My time with my uncle was unexpectly cut short, so I plan to go back again later this summer. As I was leaving their house, my aunt asked me if I’d be interested in some “old negatives” and she handed me a gallon sized ziplock bag full of the negative my grandmother had taken! I haven’t had alot of time to look at them, but I did see negatives from when my mother and her siblings were toddlers, so I can’t wait to see what treasure are yet to be found! The only question is how in the world to do that without the expense of having every picture developed. Especially because my grandmother’s camera was a Hawkeye Brownie camera and all of the negatives are about 2 inches square – but that’s a topic for another day!
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