Can It Really Be 15 Years?

I haven't been keeping up well with my blog during the past few weeks, but I knew I had to write a post today.  It is my 15th blogiversary, after all.

Lisa Hork Gorrell and I started our blogs the same day, lo those 15 years ago.  She started a couple additional ones with specific focuses, but I've kept only this general one, lumping all of my posts together.

Who knew we would last this long?

I didn't keep quite the same pace in 2025 as I did the previous year, but I had 125 posts, which averages out to about one every three days.  That isn't too bad.

I posted many more photographs from the "photo bonanza" that my sister's niece scanned.  I still haven't received the boxes of original photos, so I don't know if anything was missed or if there really are two copies of all the photos that have two scans.  But I have identified a lot more of the photos and used some unusual resources to determine more information about them.

I also wrote several posts based on "national day of . . ." prompts.  I found a few sites that promote these days (I'm pretty sure they all make money by getting companies and people to pay to have a "day of whatever" and then advertise the days on the sites).  I've discovered that they can act as prompts to remember events and stories from my family and my own life, so I've written about them.  Documenting ourselves is something genealogists are reminded to do, right?

And of course I sprinkled several Wordless Wednesdays and Saturday Night Genealogy Fun posts in there also.  Those are staples for getting me thinking of something I can write about.

I have a lot more ideas, too:  research I haven't written about yet, more "days of", more great photos to share.  I'm going to try to catch up during the next month and get back to my old pace.

Illustration:  https://pixabay.com/illustrations/billiard-striped-ball-brown-15-1433354/

New Year's Eve 1968

Among the photos in the scanned photo bonanza I received from my sister, I found some photos that pretty clearly are from at least one New Year's Eve party.  Obviously, New Year's Eve is a great time to post them!

These four all seem to be from the same party.  I'm pretty sure this was our house in La Puente.

This photo is why I think it was New Year's Eve 1968.

This is my mother in what kind of looks like a Gypsy costume.

That's my mother in the middle.  No clue who the other two people are.

Maybe the woman on the left is Aunt Sam?  No idea about the other woman.

And this one might be from a different year.  It looks like New Year's Eve with the hats and the garlands but doesn't seem to be the same mix of people as the other four.  I think this is also in La Puente.

My mother and father are the two people on the left in the front row.
Some of the other people show up in other photos,
but I don't know who any of them are.
Usually my father took photos; I wonder who was
behind the camera for this one!

Christmas 1967 (Maybe)

As I have noted previously, my father did not identify any of the many, many photographs he took.  So while I have been reveling in the photo bonanza that my sister's niece scanned, I am still trying to identify somewhat accurately the photos therein.

I have gotten much, much better at recognizing the people who appear in the photos, including my mother and father when they were significantly younger (although I still sometimes am not sure if a given photo is of my mother or her mother).  But getting the years right is more difficult, I have discovered.

These photos all seem to be around the same Christmas, although I'm not sure about the chronology.  But what year?  My sister Laurie doesn't appear in any of them, so I am pretty sure it is not 1968.  But is it 1967?  I would be about 5 1/2, my brother Mark 4 1/2, and my sister Stacy 3 1/2.  Or is it 1969, and we're all two years older?  I appreciate any insight into our ages and if the order looks right.  And I don't know who two of the people are!  I don't think the little girl toward the end is Stacy, because she's not wearing glasses, but I have no idea who she could be.  And the woman in the next to last photo is a mystery to me.  I think the last photo is our Aunt Sam.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Save All Those Photographs!

One of my father's photos which has been saved.
This is the engine from a 1980–1986 Ford Bronco or F Series Bullnose
(at least according to ChatGPT).
But I have no idea whose Ford it was!

I post a lot on my blog about photographs:  how you should identify as many as possible as soon as possible, distribute and share copies (whether digital or physical) to family members, preserve them, and generally just care about them (and not let them end up in some thrift store).  Not only are they tangible artifacts from the history of your family, but they can tell you many stories, even if sometimes it takes some effort to figure those stories out.

But did you know that there is a Save Your Photos Month?  Admittedly, it was started by an organization that has some vested interest in you buying into the concept, but it's still a great way to publicize that we should be saving those photos.

The organization in question is The Photo Managers, which promotes services for organizing photos and sharing stories.  But during Save Your Photos Month, they also offer free YouTube Live presentations related to the subject of saving your photos; they want to help you organize, digitize, and save those photos.  The first two presentations for this year's event have already taken place:  "Before It's Too Late:  A Step-by-step Guide to Preserving Your Printed Photos" (which is now available on YouTube) and "How to Digitize Your Photos:  A Step-by-step Guide for Safeguarding Your Memories" (which will probably appear on YouTube soon).

Coming later this month are:
• "Organizing Digital Photos for Disaster Preparedness", September 9
• "What Is the Family Photo REALLY Telling You?", September 11
• "How to Safeguard Printed Photos from Fire, Water & Disasters", September 12
• "How to Save Photos Damaged by Fire or Water", September 16
• "Rebuilding Your Photo Collection after a Disaster", September 19
• "Clearing the Clutter, Saving the Stories", September 23
• "Essential Tools for Photo Preservation", October 2 (a bonus after Save Your Photos Month)

And all of these are free to attend and free to watch later!

So visit the Save Your Photos Month page, sign up for the YouTube Live presentations, and save all those family photos!

A Pool Shill?

Today, August 9, is National Billiards and Pool Day.  It is noted as such on two of the "national day" sites (Days of the Year and List of National Days), although neither has any information about how it started.

I'm celebrating the day on my blog because my mother used to tell me about how she and our Aunt Sam (who was not our biological aunt, but my mother's close friend, so we called her "aunt") used to play pool.  My mother, as she told the story, was not that great a pool player, but Sam was.  So my mother got someone to play against her, and she would lose, then setting up the poor stooge to play against Sam.  That made my mother the shill.

Coincidentally, I actually found photographs in the "photo bonanza" showing my mother and someone I believe to be Sam playing pool!  Some people in other photos are playing pool or look as though they are in the same location.  I don't know who most of them are, but all the pool players are women!

This is the only easy identification, because it's my mother.
I think the woman on the right here is the one in the last photo (see below).

I think this is Aunt Sam, but I'm not sure.

Aunt Sam had a daughter named Cathy.
Could this be her?

This photo makes me wonder who the photographer was.
It could have been my father, but I don't know.

Here's the girl from the previous two photos,
with another girl and a man.  No idea who they might be.

And here's our final player!
Unidentified, of course.

Investigation: Disneyland

Ever since my cousin told me that the location of the photo with her, her mother, and me in it was at Disneyland, I have been wondering where exactly at Disneyland.

I was talking with friends a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that one of them, who grew up in Burbank, always talks about Disneyland, which got me thinking about the photo.  And it suddenly occurred to me that Disneyland, being the big multinational conglomerate that it is, has to have a corporate archive.  And it does!

You can find the Walt Disney Archives site at https://d23.com/walt-disney-archives/.  According to the home page, it was "established in 1970 to collect, preserve and make available for research the historical materials relating to Walt and the company he founded."  And it even has a page called Ask the Walt Disney Archives!  So I did!

On May 27, I sent the photo of me with my mother that I posted for Mother's Day.  (The questions page did not allow me to send more than one image, or I would have included the photo with my cousin and aunt.)  I wrote that my cousin had identified the location as Disneyland and that I had estimated the year to be 1963.  I asked where at Disneyland the photo was taken.  And then I waited.

And waited.

And almost two weeks later, I still have not heard anything.  Not even one of those automatic responses:  "We have received your inquiry and will be happy to answer you, blah blah blah."

Well, foo.  I want to know where it was.

And today's brilliant light-bulb moment was that I should try searching for the image online myself.  (Yes, I should have thought of that earlier.  Sometimes I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I get there eventually.)

I ran the photo of my aunt, my cousin, and me through Tineye.  And the answer was "TinEye searched over 75.6 billion images but didn't find any matches for your search image."  So much for Tineye.  But I think it looks for the exact image, and I probably have the one and only copy of that photo (well, a scan of it).  On the other hand, it is posted on my blog, which is public and has been available for more than a month, so Tineye should have found it there.  But it didn't.  (I've had that happen before with Tineye.)

Then I tried searching for the photo using Google Lens.  It started off by wanting to focus on the lower left corner of the photo, which is just some of the flowers.  I didn't look at those results.  Instead, I dragged the search square higher and made it larger, so the search image was the upper left corner of the photo, including the yellow flower cart.

Bingo!

Suddenly I had several images that looked very similar to mine, and they are all identified as being at the Flower Market on Main Street in Disneyland.  Two of them are even from 1963, like mine.  And after seeing two photos where the "Flower Market" sign is not in bright sunlight and the words can be clearly read, I recognized that in my own photos.

One photo from 1963 (which was posted on Found some pictures from my grandparents 1963 Disneyland trip!)

Disneyland, People at Flower Market in 1963 (an original slide for sale at eBay)

The Cook family at Disneyland, 1959 (which has the same yellow flower cart as in mine, plus you can read FLOWER MARKET on the sign)

Flower Market - Disneyland 1950s-1970s (#29) (two yellow flower carts in this one, and again you can read FLOWER MARKET on the sign; no exact year, though)

So I answered my own question.  On the other hand, now I know that Disney has an archive.  And if Disney does get back to me, I'll post here what they say.

Ginny in Black and White

Today is the birthday of my stepmother, Virginia "Ginny" Ann (Daugherty) Truby Sellers.  She and my father were married December 4, 1980.  She was my father's third wife; he was her second husband.  Their marriage lasted longer than both of his first two marriages put together.

I am sure my father took this photograph because it's in black and white.  He loved working in black and white.  The photo was in the bonanza that my sister sent me a year and a half ago (I'm still working my way through it!).  My best guess is that it was taken during the 2010's, but I can't narrow it down more than that.

I'm not sure what to make of the look on Ginny's face.  It's kind of like she's giving Daddy the evil eye for taking her photo.

Well, evil eye or not, Ginny, happy birthday.  We miss you.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Celebrate Mother's Day and Show Us Some Photos

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, so it was to be expected that Randy Seaver would have that as the focus for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post.  (Today's topic revisits the same one from 2018, with updated social media links.)

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music), is:

1.  Sunday, 11 May, is Mother's Day in the USA.  Let's celebrate it by showing some of our photos with our mothers.

2.  Extra credit:  What did you call your mother during her life?  What did your children call your mother?

3.  More extra credit:  Have you written a biography or tribute to your mother?  If so, please share a link if you have one.

4.  Share your photo(s) on your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, or BlueSky post.  Leave a link on this blog post to help us find your mom photos.

1.  I remember that the last time Randy challenged us to share photos of ourselves with our mothers, I could only find a couple.  Since having received the photo bonanza from my sister, however, I have many, many more!  Here's a small selection.

This is the earliest photograph I have found of myself.  The photo was developed in October 1962, and I was born in April, so the oldest I can be is 6 months.  The shadow on the skirt of my mother's dress has to be the head of my father, the person likely taking the photo.

I've estimated I'm about a year old in this photo, so it's probably from 1963.  I was told by my cousin Beth (who is in a different photo with me in the same location) that this is Disneyland.

I like the whimsical nature of this one, which had to have been taken by my father.  It's June 1964, and my mother seems to be pregnant, so the absolute latest the photo could have been taken is June 16, and then only if she gave birth to my sister Stacy later on the same day.  This photo might have been taken in La Puente; I'll ask my sister Laurie if she recognizes the house.

This photo was taken in June 1969, when my mother took all three of us kids to Florida for our cousin Gail's wedding.  From left to right we are my brother, Mark; our mother, Myra; me; and my sister, Stacy.  My brother looks miserable for some reason.  I look happy, though.

This photo was developed in June 1973 and was taken at the trailer park where my family lived in Niceville, Florida.  I believe, from left to right going into the trailer, it is me, Mark, Stacy, and our mother.  I'm pretty sure my father took this photo, but I can't imagine why.

This is me and my mother standing on the porch of my Aunt Dottie's house in Niceville.  I'm about 16, so it's roughly 1978.  We're obviously dressed up to go somewhere (I remember that dress!), but I don't remember this at all, so I don't know what the occasion is or why we were having our photo taken at my aunt's.  I'm going to be asking my brother, my sister, and my stepfather what they recall.  If my aunt were still alive, I'd ask her also.

I find it interesting that the three photos I'm pretty sure my father took are black and white.  That means he probably developed them himself at home.

2.  I called my mother Mommy her entire life.  My stepsons never met my mother, as she died young.

3.  I have written a tribute to my mother, as a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post in 2017.  I have also written about her many times for Mother's Day separately from SNGF posts.

Focus on Black and White

It's May, so it must be National Photography Month!  And that means another excuse . . . er, reason to show off my father's photographs.

Daddy liked to work in black and white, and while I was growing up he usually had a darkroom in the house somewhere and did his own developing.  What's interesting about these photos is that, even though they are black and white, almost all of them were taken at his home in Mary Esther, Florida, and he didn't have a darkroom there.  I don't know where he found a place to develop them for him, because so few places do it anymore.  Maybe he found a vendor online?  I really don't know.

Daddy would take photos of the same things again and again, sometimes from different angles, sometimes in different light.  I have learned that's what a lot of photographers do.  They look at the world differently than I do.  So most of these are subjects that we have many, many (many!) representations of (especially that lamp).  The majority are in color, probably because he had problems finding someone to develop the black and whites.  But he must have had a roll or two of black and white, because these were sprinkled in with the color photos.

front door of the house in Mary Esther

table lamp that sat in the family room

a small selection of Daddy's camera collection

a tree in the back yard

the base of the same tree

bird bath in the back yard

little pig statue in the back yard

a sad-looking dog in a truck in a parking lot
(he must be patiently waiting for his person to return)

My Father and Two of His Sisters

April 10 is Siblings Day in the United States.  The general idea is celebrating the bond and special relationship between siblings.  Last year was the first time I posted about it on my blog, which I did for a Wordless Wednesday.  That was a photo from my brother's wedding, with my brother and all of his siblings and my sister-in-law with her siblings.  I think I have enough photos of different generations of siblings in my family that I can keep this going for a few years.

This year's photo is of my father and his two older half-sisters from my grandfather's first marriage.  I'm glad my cousin recognized her mother and her aunt in the photo, because I had never seen photos of them this young.

Dorothy Mae Sellers, Bertram Lynn Sellers, Jr., and Mildred Sellers

As best my cousin and I can estimate, the photograph was probably taken about 1937, maybe in summer or fall.  My father was born in December 1935.  He looks like he can't quite really stand on his own, as the girls are propping him up, but he seems to be contributing some of the effort, and he definitely looks too big to be less than a year old.  Dottie was born in 1925, and Mildred was born in 1928.  (As is common, a photograph with no identification of the people in it!  Make sure you get yours identified as soon as possible!)

Since the estimate is 1937, it was likely taken in New Jersey.  According to the list of residences my grandfather wrote down, in 1937 the family was living on Grand Avenue in Englewood, New Jersey.  My father was born nearby in Englewood Cliffs.

It was probably my grandfather who took the photo.  He seems to have taken many of the photographs in the photo bonanza I received from my sister, which is where this photo came from.

I Found Out Where We Had Our Vacation!

It's amazing what you can learn once you find the right people to ask.

Back on November 8, I posted a series of photographs from a vacation my family took, probably around April 1970, when most of the photos were dated.  Some photos were at picnic tables, some by a tent, some by a lake, and some of different family members standing in front of rock formations.

I still remember that we visited Lake Mead when I was young, so that was my guess for the lake in the photos.  But I had no idea where the rock formations could be.  I threw the question out to anyone looking at the blog post.

No one posted any comments on the blog, but I did get several comments on my Facebook page.  One in particular, from my cousin's wife, suggested that the rocks might be at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in Nevada.  So I looked it up online, found an e-mail address for questions, and sent a link to my blog post, asking if anyone there could tell me if the photos were taken at Red Rock.

The person who first received my message said he would forward it to people at Red Rock to look at.  It took a couple of weeks, but a very nice person from Red Rock responded and said the photos didn't look like Red Rock, but maybe they were at Valley of Fire State Park, also in Nevada.  He sent me the URL for Valley of Fire's site.

So I visited the Valley of Fire site, found an e-mail address there to send questions to, and went through the same routine.  This person thought the photos did look like Valley of Fire, and he said he would forward them to staff at the park to see if they could find the locations.

This time I waited much longer.  I realized after three months that I had never heard anything back, so I sent a follow-up message.  My contact said he would poke the staff at Valley of Fire.

Three days later, a message came from a new person, someone at Valley of Fire.  She said yes indeed, those photos sure did look like they were at her park, and she was going to ask some staff members to try to find the locations.

And two days after that, woo hoo!  Not only did they find all three locations, they took photos of them while holding up printouts of my photos from 1970!  Look what they sent me:

First we have the photo of the Toyota station wagon, and then just the rock formation.

Here's the photo of my father, and next the same rock formation without the photo.

Last but not least, the photo of the three of us kids being held up in front of the same rocks, and the rocks by themselves.

And now I know that all of these photos were taken in the Seven Sisters picnic area at Valley of Fire State Park.  Since there were photos of us sitting at a picnic table, I'm guessing that table was not far from the rock formations.  I hope that the picnic tables from 1970 have been replaced by now, although I'm amazed that the rocks look almost exactly the same as they did 55 years ago.  I know geologic time is slow, but I would have expected more erosion.

It's almost exactly 55 years ago, in fact.  I realized that we probably took this vacation during Easter break (yes, back then, before political correctness, it was Easter break, not spring break as it's now called), because my parents weren't really big on having us miss school unnecessarily.  Looking at the calendar for 1970, Easter fell on March 29 that year.  If I remember correctly (it has been a while, after all), Easter break was the week before Easter, so we would have been there during the week leading up to March 29.  And that was just last Saturday.  If Easter break came after Easter itself, then it's 55 years ago this week.

I'm so stoked that I was able to identify the locations for these photos, and also figured out when!  Next up, I think I'll see if the people at Lake Mead National Recreation Area can tell me where at the lake those photos were taken (the person who sent me the URL for Valley of Fire also sent me the one for Lake Mead).  I'm feeling lucky.

And I did receive permission to post these photos on my blog (because of course I asked; I didn't take the photos, so I don't own the copyright).  I'm still waiting on an answer from the park interpreter on whether she wants name credit for the photos.

Addendum, April 1, 2025:  The park interpreter has decided she wants to stay anonymous.  But I gave her a big thank you for helping me solve my mystery!

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.

Celebrating the Flowers in My Father's Yard

There really is a "national" day for just about everything, isn't there?  Today, March 21, is National Flower Day, at least according to National Today (but it isn't listed with National Day Calendar, National Day Archives, or Days of the Year; I guess you have to pay each individually).  No background was provided on how the day was officially started (or who paid for it), although they do tie it to the vernal equinox and the beginning of spring.  Notwithstanding all of the suggestions they provide for ways to celebrate National Flower Day, I'm going to celebrate it by sharing a bunch of my father's photos of flowers.

I believe that all of these (or at least most of them) were flowers growing in Daddy's back yard in Mary Esther, Florida.  He loved photography and taking photos of just about anything, and he took lots and lots of photos of things in his back yard, including the flowers.  So to celebrate National Flower Day, here is a small selection of my father's flower photos.  My identifications are based on Google Image searches; if I have something wrong, please let me know.

Azalea

Southern Magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora

Closed African Lily, Agapanthus inapertus

Amaryllis, Amaryllis belladonna

Brazilian Orchid Tree, Bauhinia forficata

Crape Myrtle, Lagerstroemia indica

Jerusalem Thorn, Parkinsonia aculeata