Tag: Family History (Page 2 of 3)

This Weekend: I’m Tabling the Bucks County Ancestry Fair

September 17, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

13922_670780936343893_2335877078703481334_n

A scene from the Bucks County Ancestry Fair, 2013. Image from the Bucks County Genealogical Society’s ‘Ancestry Fair’ home page.

I’d like to take a moment to invite one and all to the Bucks County Ancestry Fair this weekend. The Bucks County Genealogical Society will host the event this Saturday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM at the Bucks County Visitors Center, 3207 Street Road, Bensalem, PA 19020. There will be plenty of great speakers and tables, including Joyce Homan of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. For more information, see the event page at The Bucks County Genealogical Society website.

Bring some pictures with you to the event. I will have my scanner with me. Time permitting, I may attempt some light restorations on site. I will offer quotes for heavier restorations and add them to my work queue. Like everyone else who will be at the event, I am a genealogy buff, so I would love to chat family history!

I will be leaving in a bit of a haste later in the afternoon to join in the celebration of the marriage of my wonderful cousin Kelsey to her fiancee, Johnny. That’s going to be blast, and I send my early congratulations out to this fine couple!

52 Ancestors, No. 26: Aunt Ceil, and the Life of a Family Photo

July 2, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

As a young girl, my mother discovered in a closet a plaque that eerily bore her own name, Celia Anflick, along with birth and death dates. It was a metal plaque that my mother described as the sort of thing one might see hung in a mausoleum. Of course, the plaque was not my mother’s memorial from a past life. Rather, it was a memorial to an aunt whom my mother would never meet. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 25: Denis Graham, a Link to the Past

June 29, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

Because this website, and the business it represents, are image-oriented, I try to have some sort of stimulating GIMP work at the top of each post. The cost of this self-imposed policy is that many fascinating family history stories will go overlooked—unless I manufacture some visually stimulating way to represent the story.

Having recently made a bit of a breakthrough on today’s features ancestor, I wanted to write-up here what I had found. I don’t have a photograph of him, though, so I had to get resourceful. Here before you is the grave of Denis Graham, who was the uncle of my great-great-grandfather, John C. Graham. I’m not really one to doctor gravestone images, but since I recently picked up a few new tricks, I thought I’d see how far I could take them.

In this image, I’ve attempted to remove the rain-induced dampness in the original photograph to present the gravestone as if it were dry. The results were middling, in my opinion. Had I attempted this project for a client, I would have given it more time. Since I’m already a week overdue on Ancestor #25, I figured I’d post what I have and move along. The hardest part of this project is putting life back into the engraved flowers. There wasn’t much left in them after removing darkness of color. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 24: My Father, Gregory

June 17, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

Mother’s Day is my clue that Father’s day is not too far away, and I have to come up with some offering of roughly equal market and sentimental value. I feel pretty bad when I don’t come through, but my Pop is pretty easy-going, and helps a lot with occasional and unintentional gifting inequalities. For example, this year, I had published my mother’s tribute on time, on Mother’s day. My father get’s his tribute on the Tuesday after Father’s Day.

Why? Well, this weekend my father was helping me puzzle through some tech stuff that might improve my standing for a job I had interviewed for. That kinda needed to get done. That’s one of the great things about my dad: If you come to him with any sort of puzzle that needs a solving, he’s happy to help. He really invests himself, too. His interest is genuine. It’s as if his success relied on mine, or whosoever’s he happens to help. Continue reading

Artist Spotlight on Tim E. Bush: A Philadelphia artist fulfills his family’s legacy.

June 8, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

Tim E. Bush: a self portrait

I’ll happily feature on my blog, here, the work of others who have mastered their craft, and who have inspired me to persist in my own little business. The goal for you, dear readers, is to visit them at their respective websites to see if they might serve some need of yours. This premier of my Spotlight Series™ features the work and thoughts of Philadelphia artist Tim E. Bush. We went to high school together, where his artistic talents brought him near celebrity status in some circles. I did not see him as much after we graduated high school, but encountering him on occasion has always been a treat. Since the advent of le Web 2.0 and social networking, my virtual encounters with him have become more frequent. This is fantastic because Tim E. Bush a fascinating individual.

Tim authors a website entitled Abstracts and Angels at TimEBush.com. He shares his art, comics, poetry, and memoirs there, as well as his Zazzle shop, where you can purchase a variety of useful items bearing his colorful designs. I’ve found Tim’s Zazzle shop to have been inspirational from a small business and marketing standpoint. Tim has made a great use of this resource to get his brand out there, and so I have on occasion considered doing the same. I haven’t put that together quite yet, but maybe I will some day.

I’ve conducted an e-mail interview with Mr. Tim E. Bush, and he gave so generously of his time to answer my questions that I will divide his interview into no fewer than three installments. He may well become a regular in this series. Without further ado, I present to you the first installment of my interview with artist Tim E. Bush: Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 22. Peter Staaf: A case study in interpreting picture labels

June 3, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

Today’s subject is my great-great-great-grandfather, Peter Staaf. This is my grandmother’s great-grandfather, that is, my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s father. Peter was the immigrant ancestor of this line. I found his passenger list on Ancestry.com, which led me to his hometown of Sterbfritz, which is right in the heart of Germany. He left that place and arrived in Baltimore on the sixth of May, 1854, with his wife and daughter, both named Margaret. He settled in Butler County, Western Pennsylvania.

Mailbag!

The Staaf family line is the only one I’ve been able to trace back to the motherland, several generations prior to the emigration. This was thanks to a great stroke of luck, in the first place, and then the diligent efforts of a professional genealogist who happened to live right in that area. I learned about Mr. Clemens Schreiber in 2009, when I happened upon this web site that provided his contact information. He happened to live in Schlüchtern, which is a drive of mere minutes from Sterbfritz. Mr. Schreiber happened to charge a very reasonable fee: $7.00 for a family group record. At that price, I purchased the whole Staaf line by mail, going back to 1613. Mr. Schreiber told me that the line of Peter’s wife, Margaret Lotz, went back even further, to about 1450, and asked if I was interested in purchasing that as well. I did not have funds to purchase all of that at the time, but I’m glad to know that information is available. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 19: My Mother, Celia

May 11, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

I’m doing something a little different today. My normal M. O. is to profile ancestors who have long passed, and are no longer around to either defend themselves or allege privacy invasion. Today, I’m profiling my mother, who is alive and well, and whom I image will read her profile shortly. Today is Mother’s Day, and so today I recognize my mother as a family hero who has earned her place in history. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 18: Minnie Anflick, A Mother Worth Fighting For

May 7, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

I’m enjoying a nice little vacation this week, but taking a vacation from my vacation to publish this blog on Ancestor No. 18, my maternal grandfather’s mother. She was born Minnie Snyder in what was once the Russian Empire, sometime in the early 1890s. Telling exactly when she was born is difficult. I suspect that several of the young ladies on this branch of the family falsified their ages on official documents, such as marriage records. Suffice to say, the birth dates on the documents vary widely. Immigration documents place her residence at the time of emigration in a place called Mogilev. There are a few places with that name, the most well known of which, I believe, is in Belarus. There is another place, in what is now the Ukraine, called Mogilev-Podolskiy. I suspect Minnie was from the latter because of its proximity to the birthplace of her future husband’s family, and also because of its strong Jewish heritage, but I’m not completely sure in which of the towns she lived. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 17: Henry Balmer, Swiss Tinner and Farm Laborer

April 29, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

I think this will be a short entry. I haven’t yet had much to say about this branch of the family tree, and it may be a while before I have any more to say. I don’t know too much about this gentleman, or where he came from, genealogically speaking. This is Henry Balmer, my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather. He was born in Switzerland on March 17, 1858. Sometimes I call him “Heinrich”, because I imagine that’s what he would have been called there. Do other genealogists make up nicknames for their research subjects? I dunno. Whatever. Continue reading

52 Ancestors, No. 16: Grandma Cora Harrison, Born on Easter Sunday, 1877

April 20, 2014 / tim / 0 Comments

This week I bring you Cora Kline Harrison, my paternal grandmom’s paternal grandmom. that would be my great-great-grandmom I’ll tell you how my grandmom’s cousin, Doris, and I honed in on her birthday.

A questionable report.

The 1900 Census placed Cora’s birth date in February of 1878. Doris rejected this claim, and insisted instead that her grandmother was born on April 1, 1876, although she had no documents to prove the fact. I had inquired about baptism records at the Lancaster County Historical Society with little else to go on. The archivists there told me that many of the churches of that time and place were inconsistent with birth records, so I might have trouble finding a baptism record for Cora. I did not know the parish in which she was baptized. I did find a record of Cora’s birth among her father’s Civil War pension file, but the record was ambiguous. Continue reading