Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Plans Do You Have to Pass On Your Genealogy Work?

I've been thinking about this for a while also, Randy, but it's good to prompt people with a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post.

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

1.  What plans, or potential plans, do you have to pass your genealogy work to relatives and/or descendants, or posterity?

2.  Tell us about your plans to pass your work on in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

And just because I've been thinking about it doesn't mean I've figured out the answer yet.

Seriously, I have no idea.

So far no one in my family is interested in carrying on the work, that's for sure.  Whenever I stop, I'm pretty sure that'll be the end of adding information.

I've been sharing information with family members for literally decades now.  Every year for Christmas and Chanukah I used to mail updates to each family member I was in contact with for every family line that person descended from.  Some have become interested in specific people — for example, my cousin Yoni has developed a strong focus on our great-great-grandmother; my cousin Jeff was so struck by learning that his grandfather's family name had originally been Gorodetsky that he created that domain, but it doesn't appear that he has kept it — which is nice, but that's pretty much where it ends.  The information is out there, though, so it probably won't disappear entirely.

I suspect the best thing I can do for posterity is to create a "family report" style book that is well documented for each of my family lines and give copies of them to the FamilySearch Library.  That will help keep the information available to everyone, as I don't expect the LDS church to disappear.

The physical items that I have, particularly photographs, are likely doomed.  I don't think anyone else will want to maintain them, especially the ones that are still not identified.  "Why would we want to keep these?  We don't know who those people are."  My father's racing trophies?  They'll be gone.  Even my family ketubot will have trouble finding someone willing to keep them.

I better stop here.  I'm making myself depressed.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Fearless Females 2021

I haven't posted much recently, but I couldn't miss doing something for my grandmother's birthday today.  And what do you know — tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post from Randy Seaver fits the situation perfectly!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

1.  Check out Lisa Alzo's "Fearless Females 2021" blog post prompts and write about one of them.

2.  Put it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

What a great coincidence!  Today, March 6, is my maternal grandmother's birthday!  So I noticed the prompt for March 6 which Randy had used and thought it would be perfect.

"Describe an heirloom you may have inherited from a female ancestor (wedding ring or other jewelry, china, clothing, etc.).  If you don’t have any, then write about a specific object you remember from your mother, grandmother, or aunt (scarf, hat, cooking utensil, furniture, etc.)."

Something my grandmother gave me before she passed away was a set of china.  She told me she had used it as her Passover dairy dishes when she kept a kosher household.  The amazing thing is that she acquired it one piece at a time from a grocery store during its weekly dishware sale, or at least that's what she told me.

For those not familiar with this practice, many grocery stores would sell a specific piece of china from a set for a very low price, or sometimes free, every week.  If I remember correctly, you had to spend a minimum amount in purchases at the store to get the china on the special deal.  If you worked at it, you could biuld up a nice set.

Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother) had full settings for fourteen people:  dinner plate, salad plate, soup bowl, coffee cup and saucer, dessert bowl.  She also had two large serving platters, two large serving bowls, a gravy boat, a creamer, and a sugar bowl.

That's a lot of trips to the grocery store.  I think Bubbie was an overachiever.

The set is "Golden Wheat" (by Homer Laughlin, according to Replacements, Ltd.).  The back of some of the dishes (not all of them) says, "Golden Wheat / Made in USA / — 22K Gold — / Oven Proof."  The 22K gold was used on the wheat design on the obverse, on the rim, and for the lettering and design on the reverse.

I have to admit that I am amused by the fact that the dishes are safe to put in the oven but not the microwave (because the 22K gold will set off the micro).

I still remember picking up the set from Bubbie.  I lived in California; she lived in Florida.  One day, out of the blue, she decided it was very urgent that I should come visit because she wanted to give this set to me and have me take it home.

The first problem was that she insisted on this right when I was planning my foot surgery.  No, she didn't care that I wasn't going to be fully mobile.  It had to be that month, December 1997.  Sure, I just had foot surgery and I had to be pushed around the airport in a wheelchair, but I could figure out a way to handle this, right?  But it was my Bubbie, so I went.

The second problem, which I didn't find out until I got there, was that she didn't give me an accurate idea of just how much she wanted me to take home.  This was a lot of china, even if I hadn't been working with only one good foot.

Somehow we managed to pack everything into one duffel bag, with a reasonable amount of padding to protect the pieces.  But it wasn't secure enough that I could check it as luggage; it would have arrived as a huge bag of china shards.

So I had to lug the bag around with me at Fort Lauderdale Airport, and at my transfer airport, and at Oakland Airport.  All while being pushed around by very nice airport personnel who were very, very annoyed (but tried to keep a good face) that I had this big bag of china on my lap during the entire time.  I explained to each of them that I was very sorry, that my grandmother had insisted I had to pick up the china now, that I didn't want to do it right after my surgery.  I don't think it helped a lot.

But the good news is that the china and I arrived safely and in one piece back at Oakland Airport.  I managed to get home also.  I don't remember if I drove or had a shuttle pick me up; it was likely a shuttle, because the surgery was on my right foot, and I don't think I was ready to drive yet.  But we made it.

And I still have the set.  I brought it to Oregon with me.  Only a couple of pieces have been broken over the years I've owned it, one being the gravy boat.  I think I lost one of the small plates also.

And I use it for my Passover seders, although I don't keep kosher.  Bubbie stopped keeping kosher after her father-in-law passed away, which was in 1953, so the dishes were already trafe by the time I got them.

And now that I've written all of this up, I'll print out ths post and include it with the dishes, so I have documented them and why they're important, just as I did with the silverplate flatware that used to belong to my great-grandmother.

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Addendum, March 15, 2021:  This is the gravy boat I received today from a very generous reader, to replace the one I broke several years ago.  Thank you so much!

Second addendum, August 7, 2021:  I found out that the person who bought the replacement gravy boat for me was not the person who shipped it but my own sister in Pennsylvania.  It took her a while to let me know.  And now I know that she actually reads my blog!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Oldest Ancestral Item

Time to go on a treasure hunt with Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Lorine Mcginnis Schulze on her Olive Tree Genealogy blog asked this question several weeks ago in http://olivetreegenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/10/what-is-your-oldest-ancestral-item.html.

(2) So have at it — what is the oldest ancestral item in your collection of artifacts and stuff?  

(3) Tell us all about it in a blog post of your own, in comments on this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.  Be sure to link to them in a comment on this blog post.

Thank you to Lorine for the idea and to Linda S. for suggesting it.

I don't have many ancestral items to begin with and very few old ones, but I did take my time thinking about this to make sure I had determined the oldest item.  I'm pretty sure it's a photo of my Gorodetsky great-great-grandparents taken in Kamenets Podolsky, Russian Empire, from about 1890.  It's the only family item I have from before 1900.

The second-oldest ancestral item I have is a photo of a different set of great-great-grandparents, the Brainins, from about 1906, taken in Manhattan.

And that's almost everything I have that can count as an "ancestral item."  I do have my great-grandmother's set of silverplate tableware, but I don't have a date for them.  She married in 1914, so that's the oldest they are likely to be, but there's a good chance they're more recent.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Disaster Genealogy Go Bag

The topic for today's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is one I should think about more often but don't, so it's probably a good thing that Randy Seaver posted about it.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

1. Thank you for this topic to Jacqi Stevens for her post today on Your Genealogy Go Bag on her blog A Family Tapestry.

2. My daughter Lori evacuated her home in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Tuesday due to a large fire.  Am I, or are you, prepared to react to a local disaster like a fire, earthquake, hurricane, or civil unrest?  

3. That prompted me to worry about "what genealogy/family history items would I take with me if I had 15 minutes to collect them?"

4. Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook post, or as a comment on this blog post.

Am I ready for a local disaster?  Not in the slightest.

I have stuff still scattered around the house from when I moved to Oregon three years ago.  I have far too many boxes that are not yet unpacked.  So I don't actually know where all the unique and important items I would want to grab and put in a go bag are.  But I can try to come up with a list of what I should look for.

• My desktop computer and Mac laptop are older and can be sacrificed.  My PC laptop is only a couple of years old and very portable, so that should go with me.  I do remote back-ups of my files on a regular basis, but I don't think everything is being backed up, so I need to check on that.

• Most of the books and periodicals I own can be replaced.  I do have some very uncommon, if not unique, items that I should have in a location where I could take them quickly.

• Most of my genealogy research is not digitized.  By coincidence, unrelated to any discussion of Randy's post, I was talking with my boyfriend today about beginning a digitization project for all those documents.  It only came up because he would love to see the papers gone, but hey, inspiration can come from all sorts of different situations.

• I do have many original certificates among all that research, however (which I warned him about).  So those should be separated out for quick accessibility.

• Photos, photos, and more photos!  And slides even!  I actually have digitized a good portion of my family photographs, but certainly not all of them, and none of the slides.  In addition, I would not choose to sacrifice many of the original photos if I could avoid it.  Some are unique.  So they need to be prepped for a quick departure also.

• I have only a very small number of items that equate to "family heirlooms", but most aren't easily transportable.  My grandmother's Passover china set is not a grab-and-go kind of thing.  My great-grandmother's silverplate flatwear would be easier to take with me if I kept all the pieces in the case, but I use them regularly.  Hmm, I have to think about how to handle that.

• The one earring I have left that was my great-grandmother's (because someone stole the second, along with a necklace she had made for me) I also count as an heirloom.  I have a few pieces of jewelry that were my mother's and grandmother's that are special.  Those are easy to collect together.

• One collection of items that isn't here but that is important to me to have saved is my father's racing trophies.  They are currently at my stepbrother's in Houston, which is prone to its own natural disasters.  As with my grandmother's china, the trophies are not something easy to grab and go when an emergency occurs.  But they are unique and an important part of my family history.  I'm still trying to figure out a way to curate them.

Well, that's what I can think of related to genealogy.  It looks as though I have some work to do!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Photograph(s) of Your Favorite Heirloom(s)

What heirlooms do you have in your family?  This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver wants to see the heirlooms readers have been discussing:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Last week we shared the heirlooms that we inherited or obtained from our families.

(2) This week, please show a photograph of one or two of them.

(3) Share your cherished heirloom(s) in your own blog post, on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments.

In previous posts about heirlooms I have written about the silverplate dinner flatware and the earring I have left (as the other one was stolen, along with a necklace) that used to be my great-grandmother's.  But I also have lots of photographs, primarily from my maternal grandmother's family.  I think my favorite photograph is this one:

This scan is only of the actual photo and does not include the card backing.  The front of that backing indicates that the photo was taken in Kamenets Podolskiy, Russia, now Kamyanets Podilskyy, Ukraine.  Because of clear resemblances of the adults in the photo (the man to a known, identified photo of my great-great-grandfather and the woman to one of my great-grandfather's younger sisters), I am fairly certain that these are my great-great-grandparents Vigdor Gorodetsky and Esther Leah (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky, and that the little girl is their first child, Etta (my great-grandfather's older sister).  That makes the photo about 130 years old at this point.  Esther Leah died in 1908 in Kishinev, Russia (now Chisinau, Moldova), and soon after that the chain migration of that branch of my family to this country began.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ellen's Questions, Part 1

I haven't been up to posting much lately on my blog, but I'm trying to get back to a regular schedule.  Lucky for me, this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is something I can handle.

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted 20 questions on her blog this week.  See Even More Questions about Your Ancestors and Maybe a Few about You (posted 27 June). 

(2) We will do these five at a time, with questions 1 to 5 tonight.

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

Okay, here are my answers.

1.  Which ancestor had the most children?  It can be a couple or a single person.

According to a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post from two years ago, the most children I have in my database for any of my ancestors is ten.  I have information on ten children for Thomas Kirkland Gauntt (1870–1951) and Jane Dunstan (1871–1954), my great-grandparents, and also for James Dunstan and Maria Hilton, my 4x-great-grandparents (for whom I don't have birth or death dates).

2.  How many years have you been working on your genealogy/family history?

I began working on my family history in 1975, so that's 44 years at this point.  I started off by interviewing family members to create a four-generation ancestor chart.  I still have that original piece of paper and the notes I wrote down at the time.

3.  Do you collaborate with other genealogists on your family history?

Not really.  I have met two relatives, both on my mother's side of the family, who were doing some family history research, and they shared their information with me.  To the best of my knowledge, neither one has continued to do so.  Occasionally I have a cousin contact me and ask about what I have found.  I share the information I have and then never hear back from them.

4.  Have you hired a professional genealogist to work on your family history?  Even if it was just a small branch of the family.

My brain is telling me that I have hired someone to do some specific research, but right now I can't remember what it was!  If I do eventually figure out what it was, I'll try to remember to come back to this post and update it.

5.  If you have family heirlooms, what’s your plan for their future?

I have only a couple of family heirlooms:  my great-grandmother's silverplate tableware and my grandmother's china.  I used to have a necklace that was made from the same great-grandmother's ring and a pair of her earrings, but they were stolen.  I also have a few century-old photographs.  That's about it for heirlooms from my family:  poor on both sides.  If either my niece or nephew is interested, I hope to pass these on to them, but that isn't a given.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Family Heirloom

This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver is following up on another question on the Family History Hound's list.

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is:

(1) The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about Your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.

(2) Please answer the question, "What heirloom do you have that has been handed down through the generations?" 

(3) Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post your answer on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post.

I'm a little short on heirlooms in my family.  On my father's side, my grandfather's father died young and the family was poor.  (In fact, my great-grandfather's mother paid for the funeral.)  If there were any heirlooms or family items, I haven't heard about them.  My grandmother's family were farmers in southern New Jersey, again without a lot of money.  Perhaps there was a family bible on one side, but if so it went to a different line in the family.

My mother's grandparents on both sides came to the United States as poor immigrants with not much more than the clothes on their backs.  I don't know of any significant items they brought with them from Europe.  That said, the closest thing I can describe as an "heirloom" is the set of silver-plated flatware that my great-grandmother Sarah Libby (Brainin) Gordon owned.

Definitely obtained here in the United States, it's a service for twelve in one of those cases that has cut-outs where you stack the forks, spoons, and some serving implements and bands on the inside of the lid where you slide the knives.  My mother kept it, apparently for several years, and gave it to me before she passed away.  She's the one who told me it belonged to my great-grandmother.  I believe my grandmother held the set for a while before giving it to my mother,

The utensils don't have a monogram or family initial and the set isn't anything really fancy, but I guess I'm now the fourth generation to have it.  I used the set every year when I held my annual Passover seder (dinner), for about thirteen years or so, but I haven't been able to do that for the past four or five years.  I'm hoping to be able to start again next year.

I don't have any description of the history of the flatware in the box to explain that this is a family item.  I should print a copy of this blog post and include it to document the history,

It's Preservation Week!

This week, April 24–30, is Preservation Week for 2016.  While the primary focus is for libraries, archives, and other formal repositories to think about the conditions and preservation needs of their collections, it is a good time for everyone to consider what they have that they would like to have last a long time.  For modern genealogists, this can easily encompass original documents, books, photographs and slides, recorded interviews, family movies, and digital media, whether converted from the previous formats or natively digital.  You might also have clothing and other physical heirlooms that can't really be digitized.

The American Library Association has a page full of resources for Preservation Week (and the whole year!).  You can find information on how to preserve your items and on disaster recovery (which I hope you never need to use).  Two free Webinars are offered this year, "Reformatting Audiotape" on April 26 and "Preserving Your Digital Life" on April 28  Also available are links to previous years' presentations, such as ""Preservation of Family Photographs", "Family Textiles", and "Disaster Preparedness", all free.

If you would like to host a Preservation Week event, there's a link to information for that.  There's even a link for preservation geared to military families!

Don't you feel motivated to go out and buy a bunch of archival boxes for your documents now?

Buy a 3D Print of That Missing Heirloom Family Jewelry

American Pearl, a jewelry company based in New York City, now offers a service where it will recreate jewelry based on photographs.  You send a photograph, it will create a 3D digital model.  If you want, you can then order the piece of jewelry.  American Pearl will create a mold based on the model, then cast your jewelry.  An article on Yahoo! says that the photo doesn't even have to be very high resolution, though I am sure the better the resolution and the clearer the image, the better the match to the jewelry in the photo.

What a great way to make a connection with your family history!  If you have photographs or paintings showing relatives wearing pieces of jewelry, and the jewelry is no longer in the family (or at least not in your branch), you can now have those replicated and wear them.  You can create new heirlooms to pass down through the family.

Some of the caveats:  American Pearl will not give/share/sell you the digital model.  If you decide to have the jewelry made, American Pearl will then make that item available through its regular sales channels.  If you want your item to remain exclusive, you will have to pay a significant fee.

When I first heard about the advent of 3D printing, I never imagined a use for it like this.  I'm going to send a photo of an earring that belonged to my great-grandmother.  I used to have the pair, until someone stole the second earring and a necklace my great-grandmother had made (from her engagement ring!) to give to me on my 16th birthday.  But I've never let go of the remaining earring because of its connection to my great-grandmother.

My thanks to my friend Dorothy from my local costuming group for posting about this!

Heirloom Prayer Shawl Stolen in San Francisco

the missing tallit

I'm doing some signal-boosting here.  On local news in the San Francisco, California, area tonight was a report about the theft of a tallit (Hebrew prayer shawl) from the porch of a family home in San Francisco.  This shawl is an heirloom that has been in the family for several generations, and it even survived the Holocaust.  The family lent the tallit to a cousin for a bar mitzvah, and the cousin sent the tallit back via FedEx.  The FedEx box was left on the porch, which is probably what attracted the attention of the thief.  The tallit has no monetary value but immense sentimental value to the family.  Anyone knowing anything about the missing prayer shawl, please contact Kathy Rosenberg-Wohl as soon as possible.  Please help return this family heirloom to its rightful owners.

Audio Heirlooms

Do you have family heirlooms of the audible variety?  That would be some kind of audio recording, such as of a family event, an oral history interview of a grandparent, or maybe a singing performance by your brother.  As with photographs, these are unique items that should be identified and saved to share with future generations.

It used to be that cassette tapes were often the way these were shared.  I have two cassettes of my aunt's uncles and aunt discussing family history and other relatives.  I even have a cassette with recordings of several of my voice recitals.  Nowadays, however, the most common way to share audio is by electronic files.  If you have old recordings, you should probably consider transferring them to a digital format and then sharing them on CD's or DVD's with family members.  Recently the New York Times published a three-part series on archiving family history; the first part discussed preserving audio, including important things to think about when converting analog to digital.

Some audio recordings are national heirlooms.  The May–June 2013 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine included an article titled "Saving Our Sounds."  The National Recording Registry includes musical, spoken word, and natural sound recordings that span 150 years of our history.  The complete list of titles in the National Recording Registry is available online and includes such things as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Fanny Brice singing "Second Hand Rose", Scott Joplin playing ragtime, and Ishi, the last speaker of the Yahi language, singing and telling traditional stories.  Some of the recordings themselves are online also.

If you don't yet have audio heirlooms to share with family members, there are some resources to help you start.  The StoryCorps oral history project allows you to record yourself and/or a relative, gives you a copy of the recording on a DVD, and archives your recording in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.  And this coming Wednesday, August 7, Marian Pierre-Louis will give a presentation on conducting oral history interviews and sharing them, through Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

I wish I had a recording of my father's swing band performing on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour.  But if they didn't record Gladys Knight (the winner) that night, they sure as heck didn't record my father.