My daughter is staying home for the most part. She has a few safe-distance visits with a couple of friends, and they all wear masks responsibly (and if you are reading this in the future, I’m referring to the COVID-19 pandemic). She’s also knitted about 15 sweaters since staying-at-home started, and she reported that she’d watched every video on YouTube. A couple of times per week she comes and scans the photos and items from the box. She gets about 15 or 20 done usually.
The photos tend to fall into one of these categories:
childhood pictures of me
childhood pictures of my brother
pictures of ancestors
pictures of people I don’t know
pictures of scenery
more childhood pictures of me (I guess no one else wanted them)
So, here are a bunch of pictures of me at varying degrees of development. Enjoy!
When my husband and I were planning our very inexpensive wedding back in 1994, we were in college and on a tight budget. Our families helped pay for parts of the wedding but none of us had a bunch of money set aside for a fancy affair, which was just fine with me. I’m not a fan of putting on a dress and getting all dolled up. We were twenty years old at the time, and now that I have a son who is 19, I can only imagine what our families were thinking. But never fear, here we are almost 26 years later, still going strong!
Someone suggested that we needed to have wedding napkins. I don’t remember who that was now but I can remember thinking at the time that wedding napkins seemed like a weird and frivolous thing. In an effort to please, I ordered up some wedding napkins. We did not have a big fancy dinner. We had “gourmet” sandwiches (made by a local restaraunt, not Subway), a few sides, cake, and no alcohol or music because, remember, we were 20. Not old enough.
I want to thank whomever suggested the napkins. During my “box adventures” unpacking the box from my grandparents’ house I shipped to myself over ten years ago, I have found a couple of other wedding napkins from family members.
Helen and Dick are my Uncle Dick Dimick, brother to my grandmother, and his wife Helen who was known as “Pinky” who recently passed away and I wrote about a few weeks ago. My grandparents’ napkin isn’t printed. Instead, it has a handwritten notation “March 3, 1945 Margaret Ruth & Carl.” I suspect this was written by someone not as familiar with the family, and definitely wasn’t written by an immediate family member, because my grandpa spelled his name with a ‘K’ – Karl Miller. So it is curious how that got into my grandparents’ collection of stuff…but I’m ever grateful it did!
As my daughter was going through the items to scan, she said “a napkin???” Yes, indeed, even a napkin can have genealogical significance.
I got most of my order from Gaylord. Everything but the three-ring clamshell box has arrived! It is on backorder but should ship next week.
In the meantime, the scanning has resumed since classes are over for my daughter and her work (lifeguarding) has not opened up yet. We came across some funeral registries where none of the front matter had been filled out (like whose funeral it was). Though there were some clues (like obituary clippings) and a tiny date written in the corner. These funeral visitor lists are chock full of surnames I recognize as family members or family friends.
Visitors to Carrie (Limmer) Miller’s funeral, 1955
If you were looking for an ancestor’s “FAN Club” (Friends, Associates, Neighbors), this is a fantastic list! (For more on the FAN Club, visit this post from Elizabeth Shown Mills.) I have had a fun time remembering the names and my childhood memories of some of these folks. Researching some of these folks might hold some clues as to the Miller lineage. (I’m stuck at John and Mary Miller! Talk about common names…)
I am white. I can’t help that anymore than people of color can help the color of their skin. I realize that being white comes with privilege and I can sit in my safe little bubble of whiteness and not feel unsafe when a police officer is nearby. However, that feeling of safety has been crumbling, even in my whiteness, when I see how these officers can treat fellow human beings in the many videos of black people being shot, or knelt upon, or beaten until they die. I feel extreme sadness and pain on behalf of those who have lost their lives, or have lost a loved one to violence, based on the color of their skin. I feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of these incidents. I feel angry at a lack of leadership at the top (of many levels of government and other private organizations); we have “leaders” that are looking out for their personal interests and seem to have no compassion for the human beings they were selected to lead. I feel ineffective and afraid. In the world right now, not only do we have a major Black Lives Matter movement going on with peaceful (and sometimes not peaceful) protests, we have a deadly pandemic that is most likely spreading among those protestors who are trying to do so much good.
It’s got to stop being money over people.
It’s got to stop being ego over principles.
It’s got to stop being someone else’s problem.
It’s got to stop being “us” versus “them.”
I must pause writing my usual blog posts and acknowledge that I stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. I also stand with other people of color, as well as with people in the LGBTQ community. That we can treat humans who are somehow “different” than we are with such vileness, rage, and hatred, especially when we hold a position of power, is sociopathic and disgusting. No one should die over a possible counterfeit $20, no one should die for jogging, no one should die reaching for their wallet when asked for their license. No one should die because of the color of their skin, or who they love, or for peacefully following their religious beliefs. No one should die for whatever stupid reason people create to hate others. These people are people who love, who have families, who are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands, and wives. I am grieving for them.
My heart is heavy. This is all I can post this week.
Satellite imagery from Maxar (formerly Digital Globe, in Longmont, Colorado).
I don’t have much to report this week except to say that I received and email that my Gaylord order is being processed and shipped! Hooray!
In the meantime, the scanning and sorting is still slowly happening. My scanning assistant is done with school for the year. She has been knitting quite a few sweaters so if I can get her to put the needles down and get back to the scanning, we will be on our way to making more progress in the scanning department.
When I get the order of archival supplies, I will write another update with photos of what I purchased and how I’m planning to store the items.
Stay tuned! In the meantime, stay safe and healthy and happy scanning!
Once my scanning assistant is done scanning, these photos, clippings, and other items have just been going back in the box or envelope for now. I don’t have on hand the items I need to store these treasures in archival sleeves, albums, or boxes. I do have a few archival boxes but they are the kind for documents, not really set up for small photos. So, a shopping “trip” was in order.
A friend and colleague has been working on the same kind of project (hi, Yvette!) and her photos of her archival albums got me to shopping. Gaylord Archival is a fantastic resource for archival materials: binders, albums, photo sleeves, folders, boxes, and so much more! I ordered some archival photo sleeves in two sizes, a binder box, and some folders for booklets.
This is part one of this series because, I’m only reporting that this week all I managed to do was get that order in. And they are located in New York. At the time of my order, the state was on lockdown for the COVID pandemic. When this posts, they may be open and shipping. We shall see. I will have to report back when the items arrive and more progress has been made. In the meantime, we get a little scanning done in between finals and AP tests!
I’m taking a short break from my Box Adventures series for a couple of reasons. First, my scanning assistant has been studying and taking her AP tests recently so not much progress has been made on the scanning front. Also, I ordered some archival materials, but since they are shipped out of New York, and New York is in lockdown, they aren’t shipping right now. So I will wait until some of those things clear up to finish that blog series.
In other exciting news, I was asked to join one of the largest (over 33,000 members and growing!) and highest-quality genealogy groups on Facebook, The Genealogy Squad. It was started a year ago by several of my colleagues with the idea of giving good, solid, accurate information when it comes to genealogy. Of course I said yes! How could I resist working with some of my favorite people? Drew Smith and George Morgan of the Genealogy Guys podcast and Cyndi Ingle of Cyndi’s List are the other administrators. We also have some fun moderators working with us as well.
“The mission of The Genealogy Squad Facebook group is to provide a positive space for the sharing of appropriate and reliable methods and resources to assist genealogists at all levels. We focus on answering questions and solving problems, while demonstrating best practices in all aspects of genealogical research.”
If you’d like to join, click here. There are some rules to read and follow, and some questions to answer so we know you are not a spammer. We try to keep the group drama-free, positive, and educational so the items in the rules are important and are there for reasons they’ve figured out over the life of the group.
I’m so excited to have been included. Please join the group if you haven’t done so already!
When I was young, my family was very fond of having large get-togethers where we all shared potluck meals and grilled hotdogs and hamburgers. I love a good potluck and I blame it on my upbringing. Where else will you get sweet and sour baked beans, onion casserole, and Jell-o salad on the same plate?
Invariably, at these parties, we would have a very large group picture. And just as invariably, those pictures ended up in an envelope full of all of the developed photos from that film roll (remember those?) and be stored in a box. That box would later be discovered by me and not know who most of the people are in the pictures!
It’s sad on some levels. Who are these people? What role did they play in the lives of my family? Who were they that they got invited to the party? I can identify the major players, me and my parents, my aunt, and her family, my grandparents, some of the really close friends of the family. But then there are the others. The fringe folk as it were. Those who came and went. They were in our lives for a short time. Who were they? I may never find out. My aunt may know some of them. But some of their identities are lost to the ages.
If you have living family members that can identify those in the photos, be asking them now. Make notes on the back or in some way that they don’t get lost from the photo. But for many of these people, it’s too late. For those, I look at these party photos and remember when we were all together. I don’t just mean prior to COVID-19, but also because many of the people in the photos have died. And miss many of them terribly.
When you are a kid you don’t appreciate what you have in your family and family friends. Then when you get old enough to appreciate them, they are gone or going. As I get older and as more of my older family members pass on, I deeply wish that I had paid more attention, that I appreciated more. Mostly, I wish I could turn back the clock and chat with my grandparents again. Ask them the really important questions. (I always think “what would grandma or grandpa think about this?”) Be at one of those potlucks again.
I hope you can answer “who are these people?” with your photos.
If you have read this Box series since the beginning, you know the size and scope of the photos I received ten years ago. It was a huge box with rather random photos and papers included. My daughter has been doing the scanning. We’ve been doing the titling together. Luckily, when I picked up the photos ten years ago, I managed to ask my grandma or aunt who certain people were and made notes. So they aren’t all completely unidentified.
If you undertake a project like this, you will likely develop your own system and methods. Do what works best for you and makes the most sense with your filing system. Ours goes like this:
My daughter, Ellie, scans an image. She asks me who about the image if there are no notes. If there are notes, she can figure out the title.
She titles the images along the lines of “surname-firstname-event or number-year” so that it might be “Dimick-Leland-1” or “Kindervater-Ernestine-Wedding-1895.” If we don’t know one of the elements (such as the year) then we just leave it off. These might change after I do some of the research, but for now, they are titled in a way that lets me know what is in the file.
She uploads the images to a shared Google Drive folder.
Later, I download the scanned images to my hard drive to the folders where I keep all of my family history photos.
The Google Drive looks like this:
The eagle-eyed among you might notice a difference in file types. We had settings set up for .tif (my preferred file for photos). However, when we moved to a new scanner, we didn’t get the file type set for some of the photos and didn’t notice until she had done many. We decided not to redo all of those .jpg files for now. Someday we might go back to it. But for now, the images are digitized as well as in an archival box and that’s good enough for me.
Those digitized photos will sit in the Google Drive for a while. I have not decided if I will leave them there. My hard drive gets backed up to a cloud backup server, so I don’t feel the need to duplicate them in another location. However, I will leave them there until I get my filing done on my hard drive…just in case.
Mainly, when tackling a large project like this, figuring out a system and sticking to it is the most important. Then it’s just a matter of hiring a teenager to do the repetitive tasks. If you don’t have a teenager you can hire, especially in these times of social distancing, the task of scanning and titling your photos is not difficult.
Put on a movie or audio book or music and get scanning!
In the midst of all of the pandemic and in my unpacking and scanning photos from the box I shipped to myself 10 years ago, my family lost one of my favorite great-aunts, Helen “Pinky” Dimick. She was married to my uncle Richard “Dick” Dimick, my grandma’s brother. She died on Saturday morning, April 18. (Click here for her obituary.)
My family was a little bit divided, geographically. My parents were divorced, and my mom moved us to Wyoming just before I started high school. Whenever we visited our Ohio family, there would be pot luck meals where family and friends came to see us and Dick and Pinky were always among the visitors. Pinky was always smiling, always interested in what we were doing, asked a lot of questions about how we were doing in school or work.
My grandma, Pinky, and their friend Wilma came to visit us in Colorado in February 2007. They seemed to have a ball entertaining (or being entertained by) my kids.
Pinky watching my son play cards.
My daughter, Pinky, my grandma, Ethan, and Wilma
Pinky was always a good friend and companion to my grandmother and I’m happy my grandma had friends and family around her after my grandpa died.
Pinky recently celebrated her 92nd birthday. She was happy, healthy, and smiling having dinner out with her family. She lived a long and happy life and I was so fortunate to have had her as part of our family. Her kindness, pleasantness, and cheerful personality will always be the thing I remember most about her.
Rest well, Pinky. Say hi to grandma, grandpa, and dad for me!
(Pinky enjoying her 92nd birthday dessert in February 2020. Photo by Sue Dimick-Dauer.)
dinner out with her family. She lived a long and happy life and I was so fortunate to have had her as part of our family. Her kindness, pleasantness, and cheerful personality will always be the thing I remember most about her.
Genealogy Pants 