Ocean Shores, Washington

This first picture is one of the condos across the street from the jetty, there is a whole group of them named for the streets in the Monopoly game.


The rain stopped on Friday so we went exploring, and the road sign said beach access, so we drove right out on the beach. This picture is looking back to the hill near the beach, it is being washed into the ocean. It is actually near Pacific Beach, Washington.


My mom and dad liked razor clams, and this is what the shells look like after they are cleaned, I never really liked clams, so I would help them clam dig, but then they would eat the clams.

This is another view of the hill from the beach access near Pacific Beach.

This is back to Ocean Shores and close to the jetty, it is now high tide and the water has came up about 8 feet since low tide, the next day the tide was another foot higher. You can see why the rocks are there now.

Carnival of Genealogy Working Women

This is a picture of my mom when she graduated from John Rogers High School in 1933. Soon she was working at Mr. Temples store as behind the counter making milk shakes, ice cream cones, etc. Later she worked at Casey's department store, but she really liked doing bookkeeping and went to work as a bookkeeper at Madren Brothers in Hillyard. I think there is where she met met dad, they would never tell us, just smile and change the subject. Mom worked at Madren's during the war, and for a while after wards. With the start of a family after the war she wanted to stay home with the kids so she started doing bookkeeping in the back bedroom of the home, and as a service to those she did bookkeeping for she also did income taxes for them. Later they added a room off the front bedroom and made an office there. There she did her bookkeeping and income taxes. My sister and I grew up around tax season, every year hundreds of people came to have their taxes done, and my sister and I made money typing income taxes. She is long gone now but I kept the business going, but with computers now I do very little typing anymore.

Ocean Shores, Washington

I left Spokane May 20 and it was sunny but windy when I left, head wind all the way to George and then the wind died. I was really glad as just after George you cross the Columbia River at Vantage and driving a high square box across that river there is an adventure if the wind is blowing hard, but no wind at all there then. I had the weather forecast for Ocean Shores and it was supposed to be showers Thursday through Monday. At Ellensburg I stopped for gas and it looked like rain soon, so I filled up and had some lunch then headed out. I knew there was construction on Snoqualamie Pass and as I left Ellensburg it started to rain, but by the time I got to the construction it was snowing hard, glad it was not sticking, but felt sorry for the workers bundled up working in the snow. It rained off an on all the way to Ocean Shores, with sun peeking through in between the showers. When I pulled in to the lot I stopped and got out the lawn mower as the lawn was about a foot high, and mowed the spot to park the mini, and then mowed most of the rest of the lawn. Got hooked up to all the utilities, and went inside to rest. About an hour later it started to rain, so glad I had mowed the lawn.

These three pictures are looking down on the south side of the jetty as the waves crash against the rocks.



This one is looking on the north side of the jetty as the waves crash against the rocks.

Looking to the ocean

Logs washed in during high tide (it was pretty low when I was there this time), later I came back near high tide.

This one is looking north from the jetty, and you see the rocks hauled in to stop the erosion of the sand from in front of the houses. It is getting pretty close to a couple of them.

Ocean Shores, Washington

I have been watching Rebecca on Kinexxions post wonderful pictures as she travels, so when I got a chance to travel to the wet side of Washington, I took a lot of pictures.

The first three are deer wandering around our yard and the neighbors yard, and I took the pictures through the window of our motor home.


Ocean Shores is a big sand bar on the north side Grays Harbor, and to keep the sand from washing into Grays Harbor they have built a long Jetty out of rocks at the south end of Ocean Shores. For these two pictures I climbed the rocks and looked in the harbor. The bright lights across the harbor is Westport, and the second one I was looking out in the ocean.

Saturday Night Fun Relationships

Hey genealogy buffs - it's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (come on, don't be a party pooper...) is:

1) Open up the genealogy software program of your choice.

2) Think about two special people in your family tree (your parents? your spouse? a famous person? a distant cousin? yourself?).

3) Use the Relationship Calculator in the software to determine the relationship between the two special people. If you don't know where to find the Relationship Calculator, go to the Help button and find out. Follow the directions!

Relationship Report for

Helen Christine HANSEN-323 b.1908
and
Charles Michael HANSEN-20 b.1948


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Helen Christine HANSEN-323 and Charles Michael HANSEN-20 are 1st cousins 1 time removed. Their common ancestors are Hans Kristin MIKKELSEN-1 and Karen JORGENSEN-2.


Lines of Descent from Hans K MIKKELSEN-1 & K JORGENSEN-2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John HANSEN-5 b.1872
Helen Christine HANSEN-323 b.1908

Anton Michael HANSEN-4 b.1870
Claude Dillingham HANSEN-16 b.1906
Charles Michael HANSEN-20 living

Helen is the last of my dads first cousins, and she will be 102 July 1, 2010

52 Weeks To a Better Genealogy State Archives

Almost six years ago I was invited to the grand opening of the worlds first Digital Archives and I wrote an article on it here. I was invited because I had supplied several databases for them to put online. The actual Digital Archives is located in Cheney, Washington about 30 miles from my home in Spokane, so a lot of EWGS members have went there to volunteer to scan and index files, but most of the people indexing are sitting in their homes somewhere indexing. The Family History Library people came to Cheney to see the digital archives and the work done by volunteers and they went back to Salt Lake City and started scanning data and asking for volunteers to help indexing. If you have noticed very few of the databases for Washington have been indexed by the Family History Indexing projects, yet a lot of Washington indexes are available on the Family History website.
I was also invited to the five year anniversary of the Digital Archives and wrote an article on the festivities.
Recently I wrote a new article on the Digital Archives and how easy it is to correct errors in the indexing and it is located here.
Do I use the Digital Archives, you bet I check it almost daily, and have corrected a lot of indexing errors, and helped indexing several of the databases in the archives.

Tribute to Veterans

The Spokesman Review newspaper has a Tribute to Veterans in the paper today telling about the flags that fly every Memorial Weekend at Fairmount Memorial Cemetery. Each of the flags are from a veteran that is buried in the cemetery. Below is a couple of picture I took when they were still setting up the flags, you can see the flagpoles on the ground waiting for a flag. The last photo is my dad's flag.

Mount St. Helens 30 Years ago May 18, 1980

Miriam on Ancestories has her story on what she remembers about Mount St. Helens blast. Go check that out if you have not already read her story.
I was in North Idaho just about 35 miles northeast of Spokane at Twin Lakes. I was pushing the dock into the lake when I noticed a black cloud coming over the hill on the west and I assumed it was a thunderstorm, but a few minutes later our neighbor came by and said Mount St. Helens blew its top and the ash was heading our way. We only got a slight dusting there at the lake, most of the ash went further south so we continued on with what we were doing and went in to watch TV, and Spokane was closing down from all the ash. Soon we got a phone call from my sister, she had went to a lodge meeting in Wenatchee and after leaving the meeting went south to I90 and they had I90 closed there as there was about 3 inches of ash there and some still coming. Most of the others from that meeting came across US 2 to Spokane and they did not get any ash till they came into Spokane. My sister stayed the night in her car at George, Washington in the parking lot of Martha Inn, but the next morning they opened I90 and she wrapped toilet paper around her air cleaner and headed for Spokane. She stopped at every town and had the air cleaner blown out and put on new layers of toilet paper, so her car came through with out any engine problems, but the air conditioner spit out ash for a couple of years after that and the heater stopped working also. The dealer fixed the heater, but then the air conditioner would not work, so they fixed the air conditioner and the the heater stopped working again. Note to anyone that encounters a similar ash clouds, turn the Air Conditioner off and put the heater in recycle setting. It does not bring in air from outside that way and so the ash will not plug up the heater or air conditioner.
She had also been to a meeting the week before at Pasco, Washington and at that time Mount St. Helens had been burping steam and a lot of earthquakes but no big eruptions. They were selling Mount St. Helens T-shirts that had animals and people running from an eruption, so I have that T-Shirt today.



I have been to the lookouts at Mount St. Helens about six times, and these pictures were taken in 2005 from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. This is the ridge the geologist named Johnston was watching the mountain the day it blew and he was killed there. The first picture is looking into the crater,


This one is looking to the west down the valley. The eruption filled the valley with 100-150 feet of mud and ash.


This is looking at the ash in the valley, look close and you will see trees and bushes growing in places now. It is coming back much faster than anyone predicted. They are letting nature renew the area without any help from man and studying how it is coming back to what it was like before the eruption.



Notice no large trees in these pictures, they were all blown down in this area, back a little they look like match sticks blown over with all the limbs missing and all laying away from the mountain.

Saturday Night Fun WayBack Machine

Hey genealogy connoisseurs, it's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!!
Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is:

1. Go to the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/ (it's right in the middle of the web page)

2. Enter the URL (web address) of your first genealogy blog or website into the search field. [If you don't have a blog or website, then enter your favorite blog or website.]

Well since my blog is not even a year old yet you really do not need the Way Back Machine to go back that far, so I typed Prodigy.Com and it went back to Prodigy.NET and showed a lot of the notes when Prodigy.net was getting started and after it was the only Prodigy (Prodigy.Com did not survive the Y2K and folded).

Saturday Night Fun Mothers

Hey genealogy buffs - it's Saturday Night again -- time for more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1) List your matrilineal line - your mother, her mother, etc. back to the first identifiable mother. Note: this line is how your mitochondrial DNA was passed to you!

2) Tell us if you have had your mitochondrial DNA tested, and if so, which Haplogroup you are in.

1) My mother Margaret Hansen b. Trenton, Mo 1914 d. Spokane WA 1994
Her Mom Cleo Travis b. Mill Grove, Mo 1890 d. 1984 Spokane, WA'
her mom Dona Vanderpool b. 1873 d. 1900 Mill Grove, MO
her mom Margaret Loe b. 1837 Ray Co, Mo d. abt 1910 Mercer Co, MO
her mom Kessiah, Brennam b. 1810 Lee, Virginia


My dads mom Anna Dillingham b.1872 Lyle, MN d. 1960 Spirit Lake, ID'
her mom Eliza Minerva Hellenbolt b.1845 Rock Co, WI d.1933 Algonquin Township, IL
her mom Rhoda Preston b. 1816 Canada

2) No I have not done any DNA testing, got my paternal line back much further than maternal line, so not sure of any benefit for DNA testing.

Wordless Wednesday Upper Falls

One more picture from my great Aunt Latisha Vanderpool's trip through Yellowstone Park July 21-28, 1915

Upper Falls and 500 steps

Saturday Night Fun Advance my Genealogy

Hey there, genealogy fans - it's Saturday Night, time for some Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to:

1) Answer the question: How did I advance my genealogy research today? [Or, this past week? Or this past month?]

2) Answer the question: How did I advance my genealogy education today? [Or past week? or past month?]

Like Randy I have not advanced my genealogy much if any in the last several months, guess working 14+ hours a day did not leave much time for research.

I did sign up for an all day seminar May 15 with Barbara Nuehring. Worked on the research for next weeks blog for EWGS Presidents.