Genealogy Jottings

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The timing could not have been better. Just as I resolved to organize my photos, the Computer Interest Group of the Colorado Genealogical Society (CIG, to the locals) offered a program on this very topic. Of course I was right there on Monday evening to learn all I could.

The speakers, Nancy and Gary Ratay, have a lot of experience with digital preservation. He is a retired IT professional; she is the Editor of the Colorado Genealogist, the quarterly publication of the Colorado Genealogical Society. These folks have lots of digital images, and they can find one when they want it.

First, they addressed the issue of an organization structure for images. They have images of not just the portraits and cemetery photos that I want to organize, but also images of all their documents. They stressed the importance of using standardized keywords (people, places, and events) to label images and sort them into folders. They created Surname folders for people and Place name folders for items like cemetery photos and county histories. Some items go into both types of folders. Once they had this system set up, they documented it by leaving “help” sheets for their heirs and placing “help” pages and keyword lists in each folder.

Nancy and Gary also discussed types of organizers for images. In addition to mentioning the Picasa software that we have used, they suggested a more robust browser-based organizer: Adobe Bridge. The latter looks like a powerful tool but probably too complex for what I need.

I think I will emulate the organization system they use, but I will stick with Picasa to do it. I already have it installed on my computer, and I have some familiarity with it. Now, thanks to Nancy and Gary, I have an organization plan and can move ahead. Of course, as they pointed out, you cannot eliminate the chaos, you can only reduce it.

This week I plunged into my photo project. As a novice in the digital image world, I am trying to take a measured approach to this. If I take on too much too soon, I know I will get too frustrated and discouraged to continue.

I decided to begin with our family snapshots from last year. Even that presented complications when I realized that I could not retrieve them all from one place. The camera held some; our cell phones held others. I had no idea how to get them off these devices in order to collect them for editing and preservation. My trusty husband/tech advisor solved this dilemma for me by doing this chore himself. He even vaguely promised to teach me to do it myself someday.

He put everything into our Picasa program on my desktop computer. Then he showed me how to edit the photos (by improving the colors if necessary and removing red eye) and how to create an album for the year. Enough to learn at one sitting! I made a successful start at using Picasa, and now I have a nice little digital family album for all the family photos we took in 2012. We also ordered prints of the photos so this Luddite will have copies in case the digital album disappears. Of course that is unlikely because we keep everything backed up.

My next step will be to create another album of our cemetery photos. I plan to use Picasa to organize that, too. We already have some of these photos in Picasa albums, but I will need to scan others and then organize it all (by surname? cemetery?). And how should I label the photos? I want to preserve the cemetery names, the names on the gravestones, the dates the photos were taken, and the name of the photographer.

Next week the husband/tech advisor will be called on again to teach me how to make this new album. I also hope to learn how to transfer the photos from Picasa to my genealogy database. I have no idea how many cemetery photos we have, but I think this could take awhile.

For many years, I sorted, labeled and filed family photos during the month of January. These included snapshots we took, school pictures, and photos we received during the Christmas season from family and friends. I enjoyed this review of the previous year, and it took less than an afternoon. If my children care to keep them, these photos will be around to document our family life for a long time.

Now times have changed, and the photo preservation process has become a daunting journey into a digital netherworld. In addition to labeling and filing my prints, I must figure out how to scan them and where to store the digital files. On a hard drive that will fail in time? In the cloud with a service that might not be there in ten years? How do they pass to the next generation?

The same dilemma applies to those photos that never make it to print. I must figure out how to transfer them from the cell phone or digital camera to whatever storage place I select. I must wrestle with photo management software. I find it all much more time-consuming than it took to manage prints.

The digital age seems ideal for photo sharing but clunky for photo preservation. We take way too many photos to manage comfortably these days. As a genealogist, I am interested in keeping pictures for posterity, but how many do I need? I have no interest in posting 4000 pictures of my family on Facebook as I have heard that some people do.

I have not yet devised a workable digital age photo management system for my family in this new era. I will work on one this year and create a system that works for us. It is time to tame my photo mess.

A new year beckons. With it comes the opportunity to begin a new genealogy project.

Since I left my day job, each year I have focused on researching the life and lineage of a set of my great-grandparents. At Christmas time, I have written a biographical sketch of the chosen person and distributed it to the family. I completed that project this year, and I would like to begin to move back in time to work on my great-great grandparents. I may do one of them in 2013.

But I have another project in mind that will take most of my time. Over the years I have collected many family photos, and they are out of control. I have my own family photos stored in boxes and many portraits of previous generations filed in archival albums. I have digital copies of numerous cemetery markers. I also have paper bags full of pictures I salvaged from my parents’ house.

I need to sort and file everything. I want to take the time to digitize the portraits I have collected and to post them on my website. I want to add the cemetery marker photos to the website and to FindAGrave.com. Organizing, scanning, and uploading everything will take a lot of time, but I cannot stand the mess any longer.

I do not particularly enjoy working with electronic gadgets, so I know I will stop working on photos periodically to do some research on a great-great grandparent. I have gathered quite a bit of information already on some of them. I can flesh out one of their stories for a biographical sketch next Christmas. This way, I can enjoy doing a little research and move ahead with my writing project while preserving some family history all in the same year.

Now, how do you run that scanner again?

This Christmas Eve I see that I did not reach my goal of putting up a new Christmas-related post each day of Advent. Getting ready for Christmas is like a part-time job, and it takes up a lot of time. Some days, other priorities got in the way of blogging.

About noon today, I finally finished all the Christmas preparation I had planned. I have done the baking (made the fudge this morning), wrapped all the gifts, and sent out all the Christmas cards. Now I can sit back and enjoy the afternoon before the big evening begins.

As I have done all my life, I will join with other family members on Christmas Eve to eat Christmas goodies and open gifts. Years ago, my grandparents came to my house for these activities; now I go to my oldest son’s place to spend the evening with children and grandchildren.

Thus the circle of life continues. I am grateful for this new generation to share holiday traditions with me. Although my sons’ children do not celebrate Christmas exactly the way I did because their mothers have traditions of their own, still we keep Christmas and enjoy family time on Christmas Eve. We have waited 364 days for this night, and I am savoring this special time today.

In the 50’s and early 60’s, most people in America celebrated Christmas as a Christian holiday. We saw manger scenes displayed in public places, and we heard carols played in stores and on the radio. As not-particularly-religious Lutherans, my family accepted this as part of the natural order.

Because the Christmas story permeated the culture, our church congregation did not work particularly hard to go beyond that. The congregation observed the church season of Advent on the four Sundays before Christmas simply by lighting Advent candles each Sunday.

Every year the church Sunday School put on a Christmas program for parents and other relatives. My brother and I participated in these. Each class usually had a part in the program—either by providing actors and narrators for the manger scene and Christmas story, singing a song, or doing a choral reading. We also joined in songs done by the entire Sunday School.

When the holiday finally arrived, the church offered services on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Our family did not attend either one.

As I grew older and began to participate in church youth activities and choir, I became more observant of church rituals. I began attending the Christmas Eve church service, usually by myself, either before or after my family opened gifts. They did not mind accommodating that although most of them had no interest in attending the service.

These early experiences set a pattern for my life today. I still observe Advent with a wreath and short daily devotions in my home. I know all the traditional Christmas carols after learning them for programs in my youth. As my Scandinavian ancestors did, I attend church on Christmas Day now instead of Christmas Eve. Religious services and rituals for the Christmas season still seem like the natural order of things to me.

Do you believe in Santa Claus?

At our house in the ’50’s and ’60’s, we did. Each year he gave each child the nicest Christmas present he or she would receive. Santa always came around sometime during Christmas Eve while we were opening all our other gifts. Suddenly we would hear our doorbell ring, and we would rush to the door. There we would discover that Santa, like a modern-day UPS deliveryman, had left a wrapped gift for each of us on the front porch. This was the best he could do at a suburban house with no fireplace and chimney.

Only once did we actually see Santa. He was actually a guy from my dad’s office who dressed up in a Santa suit that year to deliver gifts to the children of co-workers. We lived several doors down the street from another of my dad’s colleagues, so our Santa went on foot from one house to the other. Unfortunately, the little boy who lived in a house between these two happened to look out his window just in time to see Santa walk right past his house with his bag of toys. Our stunned neighbor boy thought all his worst fears of being too naughty for gifts had come true.

I was about 5 or 6 years old when I began to suspect that Santa was not as my mother would have me believe. I noticed that when we went out shopping, he somehow made it from store to store before we did, and he looked a little different each time. In an amazing coincidence, he also used the same giftwrap paper that we had. I became very suspicious about the entire concept of Santa, and my mother finally came clean about it. I felt betrayed.

I never got over that feeling, so I did not perpetuate the Santa myth with my own children. Perhaps they in turn felt betrayed at missing out on the whole thing, because Santa visits their homes today. I still prefer to think that Christmas should be focused on something other than a mythical jolly man in a red suit, so he does not visit my house.

Do you still send Christmas cards? I do! They go to family members and old friends who live in other cities.

My cards probably would strike the average person as a quaint reminder of days long ago. You see, I have not, and will not, ever write a generic Christmas letter meant to be a one-size-fits-all summary of the year. I hand write a unique letter to every recipient, about 40 of them. Each person has different interests, and I try to address those when I include a one-page letter in each card. Often, I include prints of interesting family photos, too.

This is how my mom and grandmother handled Christmas cards, and I see no reason to change. Shortly after Thanksgiving, they began writing their letters and signing the cards they had purchased on sale after Christmas the prior year. They wrote family news in some cards, or they chatted about topics of mutual interest. They hoped to get them all out by Christmas, doing a couple per day. They displayed the cards they received in turn, and I do that, too.

Not many people send me a hand-written Christmas letter any more. I miss that. I have saved all those I received in the past, and I cherish those thoughts and writing samples. Many of the writers are gone now, but they remain alive in the Christmas cards they sent to me. I hope I will be remembered through my cards and letters as well.

Who can remain uninterested in holiday foods this time of year? This subject lies at the heart of the Christmas season.

In the home where I grew up, Christmas baking began shortly after Thanksgiving. With four children plus grandmothers who always visited for a week or two during the Christmas season, my mom needed to have lots of snacks ready. We baked, and then we baked some more.

Chocolate chip cookies remained everyone’s favorite, and we mixed up quadruple or even quintuple batches. We also baked decorated spritz cookies in several colors. For these we used a hand-powered press containing stiff, refrigerated dough. Each person took a turn manning the press when the previous baker wore out. We displayed the finished product in large clear jars. We also liked to have candy around at Christmas time, too, so we usually made a big pan of fudge and put out colorful ribbon candy.

The biggest baking marathon took place when we prepared the traditional Scandinavian treats. For the fried bread called fattigmand, we prepared the rich dough with a dozen eggs, brandy, cardamom, and 6 cups of flour early in the day. Mom always insisted on fresh cardamom, so we had to shell it all and grind it. After dinner, Mom started rolling and cutting the dough into parallelogram shapes with slits in the middle while we kids folded each piece and shuttled them to Dad. He stood at the stove with the fan running while he deep-fried each piece in hot lard. When the kitchen grew too warm, we opened the front door to let the cold Wyoming wind cool us down. Everyone wanted fattigmand for breakfast or coffee breaks, and they did not last long.

To make our other Scandinavian delicacy, sandbakkelse (sand tarts), we used our thumbs to press sweet dough into tiny fluted tins. Getting the baked tarts out of the tins could be tricky and frustrating. Yet if some tarts broke, we did not mind because we could eat those right away instead of saving them until Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, Mom always made a ham because she found it easy and liked the leftovers. We gobbled it down because we were so eager to get to the gifts under the tree. Before we could begin tearing open the packages, we had to wait until someone made up the Cranberry Twinkle Punch prepared trays of cookies, cheese, salami, and crackers. Sometimes we had kipper snacks, too.

The next day, on Christmas Day, we would enjoy a turkey dinner, very similar to Thanksgiving Dinner of the previous month. We dressed up and dined using our best china and silver at a table decorated with candles and real cloth napkins. As an extra treat, the children were allowed to drink chocolate milk. We were careful to enjoy it all because we knew this meal marked the end of the Christmas cooking and baking season. We would not see food like this again for another year.

Tomorrow is the first day of Advent, and the geneabloggers group has a great idea for the season. We will write posts every day about some our family Christmas traditions. This way, we can gather, organize, and preserve our Christmas memories. We begin with Christmas trees.

As I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, first in North Dakota and then in Wyoming, we always put up a Christmas tree. My siblings and I eagerly anticipated doing so each year.

Sometime before Christmas, we took a trip with our Dad to the local tree lot, selected a fresh 6-or-7-foot tree, and took it home on top of the car. Dad would set it up in the living room, and then we allowed it to “settle” for a day or two.

When my mom deemed the tree to be ready, the entire family took part in decorating it. Dad strung the colored lights while we children held the light strand to keep it from tangling. We then added metal reflectors behind each bulb. Most of the decorations were blown glass ornaments, but I also had a Styrofoam ball ornament decorated with ribbon and glitter that I had made in the first grade. My brother insisted that it be hung at the back of the tree every year because he thought it was so ugly. We finished the tree off by placing a star on the top and hanging icicles from the branches. I do not recall having a skirt around the base of the tree, but that did not matter because the area would quickly fill with brightly-wrapped gifts. When we finished decorating the tree, we turned off all the room lights in order to admire our handiwork. Perfect!

The tree remained up until New Year’s Day. While a televised football game played in the background, we all helped remove the decorations. We stored them all away (even the icicles) in boxes in the basement until the next year. Then we dragged the poor, now-dry tree out to the alley to await pickup by the local trash collectors. Christmas was over for another year.