The genealogy bug hit again pretty strongly about a month ago. It started when my oldest brother was asking me some questions. He got a subscription to ancestry.com for Christmas, so he was revisiting old info. I got to poking around the site and was pleased by some of the recent developments to their site organization where on-line trees are concerned. It made it much more natural to link sources and records to individuals. This partially led to my working on the genealogy for a co-worker, which has been really fun. I like starting to solve the mysteries of a new family. I’ve also been systematically re-visiting some other friends’ trees as well to update and search for more info. It’s good for me to have a few to cycle between.
Last November Ancestry introduced a publishing ability that basically allows you to push a button and it automatically formats all of the information, records, photos, stories, etc. into an interesting personalized book. My family is very lucky to have a lot of old photos. I’m not talking 1950′s old, I’m talking 1850′s old. There was an early photographer in the family. It’s so nice to put faces to the names of my research. I wanted to make a good book some day, so my mom and I organized some key photos on Thanksgiving. This procrastinator finally started scanning them last week. I’m so glad I did. It’s great to see them organized.
Here are a few key pics:
This is an 1873 tintype of my great grandmother Sadie. My grandfather was very proud of this picture of his mother. He wrote the description on the back of the copy I have. Sadie was the original genealogist in the family. She had the Hopkins genealogy to join the DAR, but also had the first Mayflower links. Amazingly, all of the old research seems to hold up against skepticism. She also was very ahead of her time as quite the independent woman. She’s one of my heroes. Too bad I never met her. She died in 1955.
One of my all-time favorite pictures on the left. This is Sadie again, with my grandfather’s older brother Harold as a baby. Her husband Will is on the right.
This is Captain Spooner and his wife Lizzie, my other great grandparents. He was a tugboat captain who went between Everett and Deception Pass. He built the log cabin at the north end of Whidbey Island that still stands.
Sadie’s parents and Will’s parents. That makes them great great grandparents for me.
Sadie’s paternal grandparents, my great great great grandparents.
Sadie’s maternal grandparents, also my great great great grandparents. This pretty much *has* to be the oldest photo in our collection. If I’m estimating ages correctly, I think this was around the time that photo portraiture was just becoming big. The photos weren’t very sturdy then, so it’s even more amazing to me.
If you’re eager to see even more pictures of dead people, check them out here.
I have *many* more to scan. I managed to very carefully scan the records in the family bible as well. It’s an 1831 bible and was originally owned by those people in the oldest photo. Scanning it made me very nervous, but I worked out an odd looking yet smart way to do it as safely as possible.
all time
I didn’t think they’d hold it right in front of the ticket booth. That part seemed kind of weird, but it did lead to the weirdest looks from the muggles nearby. It was a huge group. Can’t wait to hear the totals. There were well over 100 in attendance. So far there are 76 “attended” logs for individuals or groups. They’ve been coming in steadily all day. I think the organizer is going to post an official total based on the physical event logs soon. Those list number of people per log. A lot of the Groundspeak crew showed up as well.
