Vol 7 May 2002

2002 Meeting & Events Schedule
Happy Birthday
German Gazetteers – Part 1
Trip to Salt Lake City - Part 3
March 9, 2002 Meeting Preserving Our Families’ Histories
March 9, 2002 Riek Portraits
Project – Saint Luke’s Chimes
May 11, 2002 Meeting

The next meeting will be Saturday May 11^h, 9:30 am at the Plain Library.

As a general rule, meetings will be held at the Plain Library on the 2^nd Saturday of the month at 9:30 am in "odd" months. An email and newsletter will come out before the meeting. Things can change so check the website and watch your mail.

Jan 12 Mar 9 May 11 Jul 13 Sep 14 Nov 9

This will be a big genealogy convention ( and expensive $195 for all 4 days).

I will be attending and heating up my credit card at the vendor tables until I can’t carry anymore. This convention will be covered in future newsletters.

Sunday June 23 2002 12:00 – 3:00

I am not going to miss this. The new building is one of the reasons we formed our group. It would be nice to have several of our members there with some of their good stuff to show visitors what our group is about.

When I lived in Green Bay, I attended a seminar put on by this group. I am considering going. When I get more information I will let you know.

Our first meeting was in April 2001 (at least that's what I remember.) Whatever. Our next meeting will be the "1^st birthday" of our group. I would like to thank everybody who has come to our meetings. I am looking forward to the future of our group. As a one-year old, we will have a real nice playpen in the new library.

The last newsletter included some entries from the Polk Gazetteer for Plain and Whitemound. This gazetteer gave some interesting information about these towns. There are German gazetteers. These also give a fuller picture of the German towns our ancestors came from.

Meyers Orts-und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deuschen Reichs is the "best" gazetteer. Its 5^th edition was published in 1912. The purpose of Meyers was to let government officials and businessmen what was in the town and where its primary government agencies were. These are good for genealogists because they tell you were official records are kept. It is sort of like a book telling you that the main government seat for Plain, WI is Baraboo

This is a difficult book to use. And this not only because it is in German. It was written in the old gothic script (which was in use in German until World War II when Hitler's government passed laws discontinuing its use). To make it more difficult, there are lots of abbreviations. One final thing that makes it fun to use is that there are some letters in the roman form that we are used to, however these letters can mean different things. (E has several different meanings.)

Knowing the order in which information is given about a town is helpful in translating the Meyers entry. (I copied the following from an Internet website. )

1. name of the town, its location - province and district; elevation and population
2. governmental agencies and offices
3. basic services: post office, telegraph, railroad stations or stops, and routes; availability of gas, water, and electricity, which many areas did not yet have when the lexicon was written in 1912; hospitals, banks, churches
4. businesses, trades, industries, products manufactured
5. tiny adjacent villages and large farms, their services and population

This information is separated in the entry by commas and semicolons. So this is the first step in reading an Meyers entry. Break everything down into little pieces and start translating.

Muellers Grosses Deutsches Ortsbuch is another gazetteer that is used a lot. It doesn't have as much information as Meyers but it can be read easily.

The following is my attempt to translate these gazetteers. I wouldn't make any bar bets on these translations. I used == to separate the main groups. In a future newsletter, I will attempt to "translate" Waldmunchen and other surrounding towns.

The main objective of any trip to Salt Lake City, is to use the LDS genealogy resources. However, if you don't play the tourist you will miss out on some really neat stuff.

First it is easy to get around the city. Unlike Madison, WI, the streets run east - west and north -south. The streets are named based on their relation to Temple Square. For example 300 East Temple Street is a north and south running street, three blocks east of Temple Square. Keep in mind that a Salt Lake City street is almost twice as long as a regular street.

The easiest "tourist" spot is Temple Square which is right across the street from the LDS Family History Library. The Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics. A lot of time and expense is spent on the landscaping. When I was there in October, all the flowerbeds were being replanted. It’s a nice place to take a break from hours of looking at microfilm. There are numerous statues and memorials to the LDS religion and the pioneers that founded Salt Lake City.

There is the Mormon Tabernacle where you can attend the choir practice on Thursday nights. Be careful where you sit for the practice. I had the bad luck of sitting near people who talked during the singing about their travel plans. Next time, I will sit in a corner by myself.

The Temple itself, is a neat looking building. This is one of the few places that the general public can't enter. Your best bet is to take one of the free tours of the other things in Temple Square given by the missionaries. You get a lot of the history of the area from the guides. As part of the tour, there are many paintings with religious themes. Be sure to take the entire tour.

Regarding the missionaries, you don't have worried about them trying to convert you. Sure there is a good portion of tour that deals with their religious history. But then again you wouldn't go to the Vatican and say I don't what to hear about Catholic history. You will only get into serious religious topics if you ask for it.

There is a museum right across from the Family History Library. If you like history this is a great place to visit.

Another thing to put on your list of things to do is to get high and dark. If you go to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, you can get a great view of Temple Square. The view is great at night. While you are taking in the view, you will want to visit one of the two restaurants on the top floor. The LDS Business Building also has two great observation decks. There are missionaries that are eager to describe and point out the high spots of the city.

Not everybody in Salt Lake City is a Mormon. The Cathedral of the Madeleine (Catholic) is a nice spot to visit. The Cathedral is associated with a choir school for children. Several times during the week, the choir can be heard at the church. The interior decor of the cathedral is something special. There are numerous murals that are very colorful (reminded me of some of the color schemes of the 1970's - like somebody broke into a crayon factory and tried to use every crayon).

Salt Lake City is the state capitol. The capitol building is at the top of a hill. Figuring I could use the exercise, I walked up to see it. I keep forgetting I am not a young kid anymore. Lets just say I had a definite wheeze going when I reached the top. The building is "nice" the view of the mountains and the city is great. However, for me once is enough. Along the way to the capitol there is a nice outdoor park dedicated to the early pioneers.

You can also tour some restored homes of the Brigham Young family. The Beehive House is the residence of Brigham Young who not only was the leader of his church but also the governor of the state. The Lion's Head House is nearby. Both of these buildings are just east of Temple Square.

There are a couple of "normal" shopping centers within walking distance to the east of Temple Square. There is a food court with all the big fast food joints.

A couple things I left for future visits is the; Delta Center (sports arena ), the light rail train, and a visit to the mountains. Maybe I will visit the actual Salt Lake sometime in the future. The view of the lake as I flew into town, was NOT very impressive. I didn't see any boats (the water eats them up) or a lot of beach developments (the water is supposed to have a nasty smell to it.

I will finish with a couple pieces of trivia about the area. Utah is called the Beehive State. The early pioneers had to work together to survive. The industriousness of bee communities led to its choice as the state symbol. The state bird is the seagull. The early pioneers where plagued by crickets eating the crops the pioneers needed to live. The pioneers tried everything but to no avail. They finally prayed to God who sent flocks of seagulls, which ate the crickets.

Many of us spend a lot of time gathering neat stuff about our families and histories and give little thought about how this stuff can be preserved. Knowing the "enemy" is the first step. There are lots of things that are trying to "destroy" your collection.

One of the easiest to see is what I will call "Acts of Gods." This includes fire,wind, rain, computer crashes. However many people think that these things only happen to other people. Sometimes, the sad fact is that you are the "other" person and it is your stuff at risk. (The most difficult risk to acknowledge is that some day you will not be around. Death is not something that only happens to the other guy.)

Another "enemy" that is trying to destroy your stuff, is yourself. Poor organization methods can mean lost documents. Writing names on the back of photos in ink, using glue, using acidic paper are other ways that you can destroy your stuff.

One final "enemy" is your family. Many family members could care less about your genealogy research. This is the reason why you can find really neat stuff at Goodwill. I like to think that the person that is going through my stuff after I am gone will be so sad that I am gone. Unfortunately, they might want to get this nasty task done as quick as possible and throw away some really neat stuff.

Step 1: Organize your stuff. If you keep your stuff in "shoeboxes" why would anybody want to organize it, you didn't. There are many different methods of organizing your stuff. You can organize by : person, family name or location. Regardless of how you organize your research, the best thing you can do is build an index of your stuff.

Assign an indentifying number to each of your documents or photos. For each of these items fill out at least one 3x5 card. If you have a group photo, you will want to fill out a 3x5 card for each person in the photo. Then when you want to find everything you have on Uncle Fred, you just sort through the cards.

Putting these cards on a computer is the best solution. You can let the computer sort these cards in a variety of orders and print reports.

Step 2: Get people interested in your stuff. If people don't know what you have, why would they be interested in saving it.

Newsletters are a good way to let people know what you have. Using email mailing lists and computers, the process is made easier.

Put stuff on your website. For $7 a month you can get 500 million bytes of storage. This is a lot of space and having it on the Internet, gives people all over the world access to your stuff.

Publishing books is another way of getting people interested in your stuff. Using a computer desktop publishing program and a home laser printer you can create your own book. You can make copies of the book at a local copy shop then bind them using a comb binder. This is an improvement over the old way of publishing books, which involved having to get a minimum number of books printed. Invariably you either print too many or too few books.

Step 3: Make copies of your stuff. The easiest thing to do is to digitize all of your stuff and put it on computer CD disks. These disks hold a lot, they are cheap to create and they last "forever". Using scanners and digital cameras can get your stuff in a digital form. We covered digital cameras at a previous meeting and scanners will be covered in future meetings.

Some final thoughts, make sure you have designated somebody to get your stuff and make sure you will be giving them organized stuff.

Guess the Age of the People in the Photographs

--- Guesses ---- Age In

High Low Ave 1881 Birth

35 20 26 32 1849 Katherina Schmitz Riek
50 25 42 55 1826 Christina Schmidt Schmitz
51 28 39 49 1832 Anton Riek
70 35 53 71 1810 Rosina Fischer Riek
66 30 46

In 1881, one year after Katherina married Anton, their mothers and themselves were the ages listed in the 4th column. Obviously the "Average Guesses" in Column 3 are all less than these BUT the "High Guesses" in Column 1 were reasonably close. Given that these are not true photos the person formulating the pictures has license to do what he/she wanted. Recall there were almost no wrinkles in any picture. Given that absence people naturally guessed younger. So are my guesses, now in their 3rd iteration, correct? MAYBE! I need to find a picture of Anton before I will be completely comfortable.

Photo Identification Tips:

(1) Check the Back of the Photo! We all do for good reason.

(2) Check the photo to ascertain how old it might be. Think in terms of metal plates, cardboard backing, black & white versus color, etc. This gives the age of the photo.

(3) Compare these photos with photos of known people. Are the facial features similar? Could they be from the same family or the same person but at a different age?

(4) Compare the ages of the people in the photo with your best guess as to when the photograph was taken and the people you think they are. Are the people relatively the same age apart in case your guess on the year is wrong?

(5) Look for other age identifiers like cars, clothes, haircuts, buildings, etc.

These are books put out about Saint Luke’s school. They are sort of like High School Annual books, but they weren’t published every year nor are they just about the High School. These books are loaded with photos and stuff about our parents and grandparents.

The "preservation" of these books will be an excellent first project for our group. Our main method of "preservation" will be to copy these books and make them available for a low price. At the next meeting we will continue our discussion on this project covering these questions.

Can we get an original copy of each of the books?
Who has the rights to make and distribute copies?
Do we want to publish a paper copy? (expensive, average quality, easy to browse)
Do we want to publish a computer copy? (inexpensive, high quality, difficult to browse)
Do we want to create an person/place/event index?
Do we want to add editorial comments / analysis?

The following is a tentative agenda for the next meeting

1. Doing Research at Wisconsin Historical Society Library
   & Sauk County Court House
2. Quick demonstrations of scanners and CD burners
3. Discuss Future Projects - St Luke's Chimes