Meeting & Events Schedule
Internet Sites & Goodies
E-BAY, StarTrek, and Poker
E-Genealogy Conference
Marion Wolfert - GIG Jul 12, 2003
WI Council for Local History Regional Convention Aug 9, 2003
July 19, 2003 Meeting - Cemeteries & Related Records

One of the great things about computers is that you can use them to store digital images. We will be discussing a number of things that you can do with digital images. Scanners, digital cameras, image-editing programs, OCR / language translators and image viewers will be discussed. This will be a good opportunity to get an overview of the things you can do with digital images. Everybody is welcome.

This will be a planning meeting for our group. We will be discussing a wide range of topics including future projects and the structure of our organization. This is a tentative date. A firm date will be set at the Sept 13 2003 meeting. Some projects to discuss include : St Luke’s Chimes, School records, Town of Franklin Records, Genealogies by Georg Ederer, Movies of Plain, records at the Plain Library.

The Wisconsin State Genealogical Society will be holding their Fall Seminar at the Rain Tree Resort and Conference Center at Wisconsin Dells, WI. The speaker will be Rhonda McClure. Her specialty is doing Internet / online research. More information will be posted on the following website. Hope to see you there. The schedule is:

8:30 am registration
9:00 am What’s Online at the Wisconsin Historical Society? (Lori Bessler)
10:15 am I Found It Online: Separating Fact From Fiction
11:30 am Old and New: Combining the Best of the Internet and Traditional Research
1:30 pm Don’t Be Misunderstood: Applying Standards with Genealogy Software
3:00 pm Scanners: Not Just for Photos

There will be 5 major genealogical vendors who will give you a number of ways to heat up your credit card. http://www.rootsweb.com/~wsgs/semdetls.htm

http://groups.google.com/groups.google.com

Everybody has questions. Where do you go for answers? I like to use the Groups at www.google.com. There are tens of thousands of groups on Google. Each group covers a different area of interest. Some groups cover genealogy for a particular geographical area. Some groups cover "how-to-do" topics on software products. Somebody posts a question to one of these groups and people answer the questions. Google has stored these questions and answers going back to the "beginning of time." Buried in this website is the answer to any question you might have. Well, maybe not the answer to what is the meaning of life. But pretty much everything else is covered. The trick is to enter the right search terms. If you want to look like a genius, using this site can get you there.

The LDS Church has indexed the entire 1880 census. Ancestry.com has digital images of the entire 1880 census available for a reasonable cost. These groups have combined their stuff. You can look up a person on the 1880 census on the LDS Church website, click a button and you are taken to the actual census image on Ancestry.com (if you are a paid subscriber).

http://www.familysearch.org/

This is the primary file that the LDS uses to store donated family research. You can search for "names" on their web site. They have recently published additions to this file. I have purchased the 60-disk set which gives you access to all the submitted data. If you are looking for information about ancestors, you need to look at this file.

http://www.familysearch.org/

There are times when it would be nice to make a digital record of what is shown on your computer screen. This neat program allows you to capture what in on the screen at selected intervals. You can have the program "capture the screen" to a digital image file every 15 seconds for example. There is a free version and a more powerful version that you can buy.

http://www.softwarelabs.com/ts14/3-spgfeatures.htm

There are times when it would be nice to make a digital record of what comes out of your computer speakers. I have used the standard edition, which costs $11.95 and I am satisfied with the quality of its recording.

http://www.highcriteria.com/press_rel_TR42.htm

In the last newsletter I wrote about all the good genealogy stuff you can find on the E-Bay auction site. I recently purchased a set of the Meyer’s Orts gazetteer on E-Bay. I did okay. But I would have done better if I had remembered things I learned at StarTrek conventions and watching poker on cable TV.

I was at a StarTrek convention several years ago where they were holding an auction of things you could by at the vendors’ tables. (I guess genealogy seminars aren’t the only ones with vendors’ tables.) The idea was you could get things at a discount. They offered a mug that was selling for $15 dollars at the vendor table. One confused bidder bid $16 dollars for the mug. Apparently he didn’t grasp the auction concept. (He warmed up his credit card and purchased over $1500 of stuff at the auction.) Here were some lessons I should have learned that would have helped me on E-Bay.

• You might be bidding against an idiot willing to spend a lot of money. If you can identify these idiots, you can avoid getting into bidding contests that you won’t win.
• You can win any auction if you are willing to pay more than what a item is worth. Know the
  value of the items you are bidding on.
• Auctions can be emotional. The thrill of winning can be powerful. But it does you no good to win
  by overpaying. Like the guy at the convention, you could end up with a lot of overpriced junk.
• Know whether an object is a "hard to find" treasure or something you can buy anywhere. Why
  overpay for something you can get cheaper by "walking 20 feet to a vendor table.

The Travel Channel has been showing World Poker Tournament, Texas-Holdem games. What is great about this show is that you can see the under cards for the players as they are making their bets. Its fun to watch a player bet $100,000 on a pair of ducks (twos). Auctions are a lot like poker.

• The less information you give about your hand / or what you are bidding on, the less information, competitors have to use against you.
• Sometimes a strong bid will scare competitors off.
• Sometimes a strong bid will attract competitors and raise the price.
• At the end of the hand, you better have the cards (or willing to own the item you are bidding on).

My story. I saw a 2000 reprint of the Meyer’s Orts two-volume gazetteer with a starting bid of $19. If you are doing German genealogy research, you have to use Meyer’s Orts. I thought this would be a great set of books to add to my research library. So I made an opening bid of $19. I "told" E-Bay that I was willing to bid up to $50. Within a day somebody had increased the bid to $100. I got a little emotional and increased my maximum bid to $150. The other bidder quickly overbid me by setting a maximum bid. Again I got emotional and tried to out bid the person. The bidder had set a maximum bid of $200, which I overbid by $2. E-Bay’s auctions for items end at a predetermined time. I was sitting with the winning bid with 2 days left.

Would the other person bid again? Would my bid stand up? As I put emotions aside and tried to be more rational, I decided to be a sniper. (No. This is not about hunting snipes with a flashlight and a gunny sack.) I decided to wait until 5 minutes before the auction deadline and try to win the bid at the last moment. This is a trick of successful E-Bay bidders, wait until the very last moment to try to make a winning bid. If I had been a sniper from the beginning, I wouldn’t have revealed my interest and driven up the price.

Fortunately my $202 bid held up. I felt pretty good. I had seen a 2-volume set go for $300. After winning the bid, for grins I did a quick check on the Internet for current prices and availability. Yup, the $300 price was current. It seemed like the books had limited availability. Again, I am in good shape.

Then I read that the great thing about the 2000 reprint was that it included the 3^rd volume. Whoa, whoa, 3^rd volume??!!??. The set I bought was only 2-volumes. Another lesson that I should do all my research before bidding. Fortunately the 3^rd volume was small and available at the Milwaukee library.

The two big lessons I learned were: 1) don’t bid until the very end of the auction 2) know what you are bidding on. Overall I got a good price that I am happy with. But I could have been happier if I had followed the lessons I should have learned from StarTrek and Poker.

I am a sucker for any genealogy conference. This summer, Family History Radio sponsored the first genealogy conference given on the Internet. This conference exceeded my expectations and was a great way to learn about genealogy.

The $70 cost was fair. (For some reason, they offered me a $25 discount.) They had great speakers at the conference. The speakers prerecorded their presentation, which combined with great images were made available over the Internet. Attendees could view any or all of the presentation anytime during a 2-month period. Attendees could also download handouts. There were a couple of presentations that were clunkers. And some of the handouts could have been better. However, the majority of the presentations and handouts were at an "above average" level. There "vendor tables" at the conference. However I did not find these particularly interesting or unique.

I am one for two with Internet programs. I attended a less-than useful / interesting online German Genealogy class last year, that made think the idea of online-genealogy training was not ready for primetime. The E-Genealogy conference showed me that done right, online training does work.

The title for this year’s workshop was "Pathways to the German Homeland" by Marion Wolfert. Marion is a native of Germany who lives and works in Salt Lake City as a researcher. She spends a significant amount of time each year visiting her family and doing research in Germany. (She did a tremendous job of researching my ancestors a couple of years ago.) I knew she was a great researcher. Now I know she is a great speaker too.

My favorite presentation was the one on every day life. I was especially struck by how difficult the the lives of children were. First off children didn’t get to be children very long. Most children left home at the between 13 and 14 years old. In many cases they went to work as servants for large farms and businesses. Their treatment wasn’t very nice. In some cases they lived with a mixture of other boys and girls in a large dormitory. Marion described how having young adolescents so close together led to out-of-wedlock births.

Marion also discussed the difficulties that adults faced. Many of the main parts of a person’s life were not under their control. Marriages need approval of the local civil and religious leaders. If you wanted to learn a trade you had to follow the rules which made you a "slave" for long period of time. Deciding on where you were going live also needed the approval of the "powers" in control of a community.

I am a firm believer that many of my great finds were due to some "mysterious force." This made Marion’s story about one of her research successes even more interesting to me. She was finishing her shift as a research assistant at the LDS Library in Salt Lake City. As she walked by an elevator, a lady unknown to her gets out and tells Marion that Marion needs to help her with a research project. After a good deal of discussion, Marion was able to determine how to help the mystery woman. Marion was surprised that the woman just chosen her out-of-the blue. Turns out Marion had personal knowledge of the area in Germany. Marion probably was the only person in the library that could have helped her. Marion asked the woman why the woman picked her. The mystery woman stated that she had a revelation that the first person she saw when she got off the elevator would be able to help her. It always helps to have an ancestor looking out for you.

Next year’s workshop will be held Saturday, July 10, 2004. The speaker will be Roger Minert who is a phenomenal researcher and speaker. Roger Minert was the speaker for the 2001 workshop and was very informative.

The Wisconsin Council for Local History held their annual convention for the southwest region at UW-Baraboo. I attended as a member of the Sauk County Historical Society. (If you are not a member, you should be.) It is impossible to draw a clear line between genealogy and history. This convention was a great opportunity to meet and talk with people "working on the history side of the street" of family research.

There was an interesting discussion on issues facing local history societies. Attendees had of choice of three break-out sessions: Area Research Centers, Museum Software, and Using the Internet. After lunch, there a superb demonstration of the costumes at the Circus World Museum. In the afternoon we took a neat bus ride through Baraboo. I didn’t realize that there were so many houses with historical stories in Baraboo.

The last part of the convention was a get-together at the Sauk County Historical Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum in a while. And I was very impressed with the reorganized museum. There is a more open / less cramped feeling to the research and museum areas. The museum’s collection contains a lot of genealogical and historical information about Sauk County that can’t be found anywhere else.

There is lots of good stuff that you can find about your ancestors in cemeteries. For most of us in the Plain area, our ancestors are buried in the two main cemeteries, which are less than a mile apart.

One of the best pieces of data you can find in a cemetery is the stuff written on the tombstone. Fortunately the Old Cemetery Society of Wisconsin has transcribed all the tombstones in Sauk County. Most of these transcriptions only were completed before the mid-1980’s so they won’t include recent tombstones. Volume 6 of this 11 volume series covers the Plain, Spring Green and Loretto cemeteries including:

PLAIN: White Mound, Pleasant Hill, St. Luke’s Old, St. Luke’s New, Indian Grave

BEAR CREEK: Our Lady of the Fields, Old Donahue Cemetery, St. Patrick’s, Marble Ridge, Ward, Niemand / Nieman Family, Big Hollow Lutheran

SPRING GREEN: Spring Green, Old Pioneer, St. John’s, Talbot Children, Welsh Church, Davison Family, Hood Family.

This volume not gives all the details on the tombstones, not just names and dates. It also gives you the history of the various cemeteries (including family cemeteries). You will want to check out volume 11 of this series because it has corrections and additions to the previous volumes. In addition the people doing the transcriptions also looked at death certificates at the Sauk County Court House.

This might seem like extra work to look at death certificates. But there is a rule with tombstones; "Just because it is written in stone, doesn’t mean that it is written in stone." Five of my ancestors’ tombstones have misleading or just simply incorrect information. This is a reminder that you should check and double-check your research information.

Another great source is the Nachreiner Funeral Book. Nachreiner was the "funeral director" in Plain during the first third of the 1900’s. These records contain a lot of interesting stuff, including relatives and cause of death. It is also interesting to see the detail costs of the burial. The Nachreiner Funeral Book is on CD disk and is available from our group.

In case you don’t know the cemeteries in the area you are researching, the federal government has a site that contains "all" the geographic locations in the US. It doesn’t contain every single place, but it has the most. The "Geographic Names Information System" is a great place to find cemeteries and churches. One of the nice benefits if you find a church, there is likely to be a cemetery nearby. Another really great thing about this site is you can get neat maps of an area. These maps come in several flavors. There are simple maps that don’t have a lot of details. There are topographic maps which show more details and where the hills and valleys are. The really, really great map is the aerial photos. The detail on these maps is amazing. You can see houses in tremendous detail.

http://geonames.usgs.gov/

Another way to find cemeteries that are hiding on you is to look at the supplemental schedules to the US Federal Census for 1840 through 1880. These supplemental schedules give information about churches and cemeteries that existed when the census was taken. This can give you the names of cemeteries that are no longer in use or forgotten.

You can find a lot about cemeteries using the Internet. Cyndi’s list has lots of information about cemeteries http://cyndislist.com/cemetery.htm. Interment Net has transcriptions gathered on cemeteries

throughout the world. Not every cemetery is listed, but it is worth a look. http://www.interment.net/. A number of Catholic dioceses have their own sites with transcriptions and search features that are really neat. http://www.cemeteries.org/

We also looked at some of the tombstones in local cemeteries. Tombstones just don’t have names and dates anymore. With new techniques, tombstones can be works of art. This art can include; scenes of nature, images of hobbies, and photos.

I mentioned a really neat genealogical-friendly tombstone. It has the "usual" names and birthdates of the husband and wife. On the back of the tombstone was the really good stuff. It had both of their parents and all of their children’s names. I was surprised when somebody in the audience said that it was their tombstone. (No. We did not get a visitor from the great beyond at our last meeting.)

Some tombstones contain military service information. Civil war service, units served with, and whether the person was in a prisoner of war camp.

Some tombstones contain detail information about the ancestral home in Europe. People of Irish descent seemed to include this information in many cases.

Some tombstones have a story to tell. The Richard Meister family tombstone reminds us of the horrible accident involving a run-away wagon that killed 7 members of the family.

Some tombstones can be misleading. In my tour of local cemeteries I noticed a number of tombstones that indicated the person was buried someplace else. Another thing to be aware of when you are looking through cemeteries is that you might not be looking at an original tombstone. Some descendants decide that their ancestor should have a new stone. This can make some of the information on the new and improved stone might have incorrect information on it.

We also discussed a "tool kit" that you might want to take to the cemetery with you. We talked about how you can take a tombstone home with you legally, well maybe a copy of the tombstone. You can make a rubbing of a tombstone. You can make a plaster-of-paris copy. Or you can take a photo of the tombstone. Taking a photo is the method I prefer. It does the least amount of damage.

The handout for the meeting contains more detail about the presentation and can be found on the website.

We want to get your comments and suggestions. garylhaas@yahoo.com

Be sure to check the website occasionally. solo18.abac.com/garylhaas/