What's that you say, Lassie? Someone needs help?

Avro Lancaster bomber

I only recently read about this search, so it's very short notice.  Every living veteran who served in the UK Bomber Command during World War II is being sought for the unveiling of a new memorial, the International Bomber Command Centre, on October 2.  Anyone knowing of any Bomber Command veteran should register the name by e-mailing events@internationalbcc.co.uk or writing to The IBCC, 13 Cherry Holt Road, Bourne, Lincolnshire, PE10 9LA.  More information is available in a BBC article.

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The Minnesota Military Museum has a "Veterans Registry" on its new Web site and is requesting assistance to gather stories from veterans.  The registry is a statewide database with information about the military service of Minnesota veterans.  A qualified veteran is anyone who once served or is currently serving in the U.S. military and was either born in or lived in Minnesota.  The plan is to have the most comprehensive online database of Minnesota veterans available to the public.

Anyone can submit a Minnesota veteran's story and pictures of veterans ranging from the Civil War to today.  The service is free of charge and is part of the museum's mission.  If you are interested in learning more or making a submission, visit the museum's site and click on "Veterans."

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The Jewish Community of Nuremberg is in possession of the so-called Sturmer or Streicher Library, a collection of approximately 10,000 books taken by the Nazis from Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, and others.  The books primarily appear to have been taken from Nuremberg, Franconia; Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine; and Vienna, Austria.  The Jewish Community is asking for assistance in finding the former owners or their descendants so that the books may be returned.

More background on the collection, a list of known owners, and photos of identifying information from the books is available on GenTeam.  Contact Leibl Rosenberg, representative of the city of Nuremberg, with questions and research results.

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A new cemetery project is looking for help from genealogists everywhere.  Ryan Vinson’s "Here Lies" encourages users to visit cemeteries and catalog grave sites via an app using GPS data.  Someone using the app uploads a photo of one or more tombs or gravestones, then adds the name and date of birth, and possibly comments.  The digital recording of that burial location will remain forever, even if the markings on the stone fade or are damaged, or the stone itself no longer exists.

Vinson is particularly interested in information from small family graveyards and similar cemeteries that often become neglected and forgotten, and where lack of regular care can lead to deterioration that makes gravestones impossible to identify.  At present only a small number of gravestones is on the app, but with the help of volunteers, it could grow to be a useful database.

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The Fittonia

The town of Grimsby, England lost about 375 fishing trawlers during World War I to mines and U-boats.  Most were destroyed while fishing, while some were requisitioned by the British government to assist with the war effort and were lost as far away as Iceland, Canada, and South Africa.  Twenty-five of the boats have already been researched, and funding has been obtained to research thirty more.  There is now an outreach effort to volunteers worldwide to help map the other lost fishing boats.

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England's Tate Museum is asking for help in identifying buildings and landscapes in nearly 1,000 photographs of the English countryside taken by artist John Piper from the 1930's to the 1980's.  The museum is also looking for contributions of current shots of the almost 6,000 locations that Piper photographed.  If you think you might be able to identify some of the unknown locations in the photographs, visit the Tate's page about the Piper collection.

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Two researchers from the Santa Clara County (California) Historical and Genealogical Society are working on a national project called Faces Never Forgotten, an effort to collect photographs of every Vietnam War casualty for placement in a museum near the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.  They are working on service members from Santa Clara County.  They have found many photographs in obituaries in local newspapers, but for those casualties whose obituaries lacked photographs, they have been searching in high school yearbooks.  In pursuit of the final missing photos, they are now searching for copies of the following yearbooks:

Andrew Hill: 1967, 1968	Mountain View: 1960 through 1969
Buchser: 1966, 1969	Overfelt: 1966, 1967
Campbell: 1966, 1967, 1968	Pioneer: 1968
Cupertino: 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969	Ravenswood: 1962
Del Mar: 1964, 1965	Samuel Ayer: 1966, 1967
Fremont: 1968	San Jose: 1966, 1967, 1968
James Lick: 1966	Santa Clara: 1952
Leigh: 1965, 1966, 1967	Saratoga: 1965
Lynbrook: 1966, 1967 1968	Washington (Union City): 1965
Mount Pleasant: 1966	Westmont: 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968

If you have one of the yearbooks being sought, please e-mail research@scchgs.org and put “High School Yearbooks” in the subject line.  The researchers will get back to you and let you know what to do next.

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This might not be considered genealogy-related by some, but I tend to think of archives such as this as wonderful places to look for information about people.  The San Francisco Opera Archive is looking for volunteer assistance with organizing materials related to the history of the San Francisco Opera.  A minimum time commitment of three hours per week is required.  PC skills, including Word, Excel, and Outlook proficiency, are important.  Knowledge of opera is helpful but not required.  If you are interested, contact afarris@sfopera.com.

Wordless Wednesday

More Newspaper Links Added to Wikipedia Page

I was stunned when I discovered I had not written about new links on the Wikipedia newspaper archives page since last December.  It has been on my list of things to do, but somehow it kept slipping further down the list.  I'm glad I have caught up for a while, at least a little.  This batch has some locations with little available online, such as Kenya and Puerto Rico, plus I personally found the Belvidere newspaper obituary index very useful for my own family research.  If you're researching in Iowa, there are six new archives listed.  And all of these new links are free, just like last time!

• British Columbia, Canada:  The Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive on the Vanderhoof Public Library site has three digitized area newspapers.

• Ontario, Canada:  Digital Kingston has a site with newspapers going back to the early 19th century.  It overlaps with Kingston papers in the OurOntario.ca Community Newspapers Collection but has some earlier and some additional newspapers available.

• Ontario, Canada:  Thunder Bay Public Library has several downloadable PDF index files available on its site for birth/marriage/death notices, obituaries, social news, and even some World War I references for 1914.

• India:  The University of Heidelberg has digitized copies of most of the 1781 issues of Hicky's Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser.

• Israel:  Five newspapers have been added to the online holdings of the National Library of Israel, three published in Israel and two in New York.

• Kenya:  Virginia Tech hosts a digital archive of the Kenya Gazette.  Currently the collection runs from 1972–1989; plans are to digitize all issues of the Gazette, going back to the 1890's.

• Puerto Rico:  The Gazeta de Puerto-Rico has been added to the Chronicling America collection.  The date range is 1837–1893, but there are gaps.

• Arkansas:  Index to Benton Courier (Saline County) obituaries from 1930–present, downloadable as PDF files.

• California:  The San Mateo County Genealogical Society has downloadable PDF files with indices of newspaper birth/marriage/death notices and of obituaries (along with indices to various county records).

• Illinois:  The Evanston Public Library has a searchable index for the Evanston Review that currently covers 1925, 1966–1972, and 1999–2004.

• Iowa:   The Appanoose County Historical Society has an online archive of Centerville newspapers.

• Iowa:  The Monroe County Historical Society has an archive of newspapers for Albia and other locations in the county.

• Iowa:  The Museum of Danish America has digitized some Danish-American newspapers and a scrapbook.

• Iowa:  Sioux County has a second historical newspaper archive site, this one through Advantage Preservation.  The coverage is not the same as that through Newspaper Archive.

• Iowa:  Taylor County has an online collection of digitized historical newspapers ranging from 1859–2009.

• Iowa and Missouri:  O'Dell's Abstracted Newspaper Index covers southwest Iowa and northwest Missouri for 1859–2014.

• Minnesota:  The Great River Regional Library has an obituary index for the St. Cloud Times that covers 1928–2013, which is helpful, because the Times itself is available only for recent years via a ProQuest subscription database.

• New Jersey:  An index of obituaries and other death announcements has been created for the Belvidere Apollo/Intelligencer/Apollo Journal (as with many newspapers, the name changed over the years), downloadable as PDF files.  So far the index runs from 1826–1914, and the volunteer creating it plans to finish the entire run of the paper, through 1953.  I am thrilled this index is available online, because my 3rd-great-grandfather Franklin P. Sellers published the newspaper under the Intelligencer name.  The index includes obituary listings for him, my 3rd-great-grandmother Rachel G. Sellers, my 2nd-great-grandfather Cornelius G. Sellers, and a few more relatives.  (Though I unfortunately did not find a listing for Cornelius' step-brother, William/John Mathews.)  I will soon be sending a request for photocopies to the Warren County Library!

• New York:  The Troy Irish Genealogical Society has created an index of death notices appearing in Lansingburgh newspapers from 1787–1895.  It also has an index of death notices collected by the Burden Iron Company in Troy.

• Ohio:  Obituary indices for the Akron Beacon Journal from 1841–2012, downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Barberton Public Library has indices to obituaries in four local newspapers, covering 1892–1960.  They are downloadable as PDF files.

• Ohio:  The Huron County library has online birth announcement and obituary indices for the Willard area.  I can't find a way to tell what years they cover.

• Oklahoma:  The Muskogee County Genealogical Society has an index to all deaths that were found in Muskogee newspapers, not just from obituaries and death notices.

• Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania State University is hosting a 1937–2014 obituary index for the Centre Daily Times.  Many years also have images.

• Pennsylvania:  The Lititz Public Library has a downloadable PDF file with an obituary index for 1877–1998 for two local newspapers.

• Rhode Island:  The Cowl, the student newspaper of Providence College, has been digitized from its beginning in 1935 through 1980, except for 1944–1945 (which I suspect will be added soon).

• Washington:  The Bainbridge Review 1941–1946 has been digitized and made freely available on the Kitsap Regional Library Web site.  The newspaper is significant because its publishers consistently published editorials railing against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.  The project is also special because volunteers transcribed the articles instead of relying on OCR.

• United States National:  Transport Topics, the national newspaper for the trucking industry (I had no idea there was such a thing), has begun to post archival content free on its site to celebrate its 80th anniversary.

In other newspaper news, there was another sighting of a rare newspaper on Antiques Roadshow. In Charleston, West Virginia, a woman came in with issues of the 1945 Oak Ridge Journal bound in two books.  Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the town created to house people working on the Manhattan Project.  The woman's mother was the editor of the newspaper.  Looking at the paper's listing on Chronicling America, it seems that mostly a few scattered copies are known to exist, and certainly not the entire year for 1945.  As I said when a four-year run of the Confederate newspaper The Family Friend was appraised last year, how do we find this woman and convince her that these papers should be digitized and shared with others?  At least in this situation I think it's less likely she'll be tempted to turn around and sell them.

Unfortunately, I've had a negative experience recently with online newspaper listings.  I read a blog post where someone copied an entire section from the Wikipedia newspaper page, literally word for word — even including the internal Wikipedia links — and wrote about it as though it were their own work.  So many people believe that because something is on the Internet, they can just copy it and not credit where it came from.  Conveniently for the "author", the blog is not set up to accept comments.  Well, if nothing else, I consider this type of behavior a great way to learn who I would not want to work with or trust for research.

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Favorite Family Photograph

Randy's challenge this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun was to post a favorite family photograph and tell about who is in it:

1)  Show us one of your favorite photographs of your family - a group, yourself, your mom, your dad, your sibling(s), your grandparents, etc.  Tell us about it - the date, the event, the setting, the persons in the photograph.

I'm only a few hours late!  But this was an easy choice for me, especially with the inspiration of Randy's four-generation photo.

This is one of the few five-generation photos I have for my family.

Date:  Probably 1982, because the baby was born in March 1982.

Event:  Just the fact that five generations were together was probably enough, but maybe also to celebrate the new baby.

Setting:  I don't know, but probably my cousin's or my aunt's home.  (I need to ask my cousin!)

Persons, left to right:

Anna Gauntt Stradling (1893–1986), my paternal grandmother, mother of Ruth Stradling Appleton

Ruth Carrie Stradling Appleton (1914–1984), my father's oldest half-sister and my aunt, mother of Ruth Anne Appleton

Forrest Ronald Appleton, my first cousin once removed, father of Forrest Ronald Appleton II

Ruth Anne Appleton, my first cousin, mother of Forrest Ronald Appleton

Forrest Ronald Appleton II, my first cousin twice removed

Now that I've noted all the years, I realized that this photo is even more special, because only two years later my aunt passed away, followed two years after that by my grandmother.  I'm glad they took this photo when they did!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Special Discovery in an Unexpected Place

The many books available from Arcadia Publishing are easy to overlook as sources of real family history information.  Arcadia is essentially a vanity press publishing house, where you provide a fully laid-out book that Arcadia then prints and distributes.  From what I have heard, authors are paid a flat fee.  They must adhere to specific production requirements that fit a formula -- set number of pages; maximum number of words in the introduction, per caption, overall.  The books rely primarily on older, copyright-free photos so that no royalties have to be paid.  No index is permitted.  Arcadia doesn't provide any editing; whatever you submit is what goes into print.  The quality can vary quite a bit from book to book.

I learned about these books when I picked up one about St. Paul, Minnesota at a used book store.  Some cousins on my mother's side settled in St. Paul, and I thought maybe their names might be in the book.  At the store I looked at the back of the book and discovered it didn't have an index, but it was marked down and affordable, so I splurged.  I read through the entire book and didn't find any of my relatives' names.  I did, however, create a name index for the book and uploaded it to Rootsweb, so at least other people would have the benefit of a finding aid.

That said, it is possible to find surprising gems in the books.  I was recently sent a two-for-one offer with free shipping, so decided to look around and see if something caught my eye.  I bought books on Mount Holly, New Jersey, where my grandmother's family and my grandfather were from, and East Orange, New Jersey, where most of my half-sister's mother's family was located.  When the books arrived I paged through the Mount Holly one, reading the names in every caption, hoping to find one I recognized.  The most I was expecting was perhaps a photo of a building that was identified as having belonged to an ancestor.

In the caption of a 1929 photograph of the Mount Holly High School Dramatic Club, I saw my father's oldest sister's name.  I wasn't sure if it was her, because I had never seen any photos of her from that period, so I did a quick scan of her face and sent it to my cousin.  At first she wasn't sure either, and I learned that she didn't have any photographs of her mother from when she was young.  Apparently the family didn't have a lot of money to spend on luxuries.  But we figured out it really was her mother, and now she has a photo and some information about her mother from when she was in high school.  I guess that coupon was a good investment.

Newspaper Links Recently Added to Wikipedia Page

I've added several new links to the Wikipedia online newspaper archives page.  All but one of them are free (hooray for free!).

• Québec:  Translated obituaries from the Keneder Adler for 1908–1932
• Wales:  The National Library of Wales has begun putting digitized newspapers and magazines online.  So far issues cover 1844–1910, and they plan to add a lot more.
• California:  The Free Speech Movement is a selection of scanned newspaper issues, mostly from the Berkeley Daily Gazette and the San Francisco Chronicle, relating to the movement.
• California:  San Leandro Public Library index to two local newspapers
• California:  University of Southern California "Trojan Family Archive", which includes the Daily Trojan (the student newspaper) from 1912–present (I used to work at the DT doing hard-copy paste-up and some editing!)
• Illinois:  Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey translations from 22 different languages of foreign-language newspaper articles from 1855–1938
• Louisiana:  New Orleans Bee posted as images only (no search) for 1827–1923
• Minnesota:  Chaska Valley Herald for 1862–1887
• New York:  Like jazz?  Issues 1–58 of the Buffalo Jazz Report are free online.
• Ohio:  The American Israelite (Cincinnati) is available for 1854–2000 as a pay service from ProQuest.
• Texas:  The J. C. Penney company used to publish an in-house newsletter called the Dynamo from 1917–1932. A sampling of 31 issues is online.
• Wisconsin:  Eleven newspapers from the Door County library, ranging from 1873–1925

I posted recently about having added a link to the Newspaper Abstracts site.  I found about 20 articles there that had been transcribed from the Winters (California) Advocate of the 1870's and 1880's.  What a great find!