Wordless Wednesday Lake Harriet, Minneapolis, Minnesota

This is another postcard from my dad's collection, probably from his sister that went to school in Minneapolis in the mid 1910s. The back side is blank.

Saturday Night Fun Genealympics

Long time  readers of Genea-Musings and other genea-blogs will recall the 2008 Genea-Blogger Group Games, created by Thomas MacEntee, Kathryn Doyle and Miriam Midkiff - see the competition categories here.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to COMPETE in the 2012 SNGF Genealympics.  Your effort can extend until Sunday, 12 August. 

For these 2012 SNGF Genealympics, the motto is "Research, Cite, Analyze, Resolve, Conclude!"

Competitors can:

1)  Perform one or more of the challenges outlined in Announcing the Summer 2008 Genea-Blogger Group Games!  Same medal levels.

2)  Perform one or more challenges outlined below (created by me on the spur of the moment here!):

a)  Design your own Genealympics flag to represent your ancestry, heritage or personal expression. Unfortunately, the custom flagmaking web site used in 2008 is no longer available, and I could find no other free site that did a similar function.  It may be easiest to use the Flags of the World site, save the country flags of your choice, and create your own graphic using a graphics program (or any program that will let you import and manipulate images, and save the image for display.

b)  Pick any one of your 16 great-great-grandparents, or one of your spouse's 16 great-great-grandparents.  How many descendants of that person do you have in your family tree records or database?  (Hint, a Descendants Report in your genealogy software should easily provide this number).

Medal Awards:
*   Bronze:  over 50 descendants
*  Silver:  over 100 descendants
*  Gold: over 150 descendants
*  Diamond:  over 200 descendants
*  Platinum:  over 250 descendants

c)  Pick one of your ancestral surnames, or one of your spouse's ancestral surnames.  How many generations back from the last person with that surname in your ancestry have you researched, identified and accept as your ancestor?  [Note:  if you are doing your own surname, don't count yourself).

Medal Awards:
*   Bronze:  at least 4 generations
*  Silver:  at least 6 generations
*  Gold: at least 8 generations
*  Diamond:  at least 10 generations
*  Platinum:  at least 12 generations
 

  Well here are the major flags of my ancestors, USA, Denmark and Great Britain

If I pick my great great grandfather Mikkel Madsen he has as of last count 720 descendants for a platinum medal

For my ancestral surnames I pick Dillingham which has 13 generations for another platinum medal

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy Serendipity

Week #30 – Genealogy Serendipity

Week 30: Genealogy Serendipity. Every genealogist has tales of surprise findings or coincidences when climbing the family tree. What is your most memorable serendipitous discovery? Did it involve ancestors in your tree, living folks or both? How did this surprise affect your research and does it still impact you today?


Several years ago my dad, my sister and I went to one of his military reunions in Rockford, Illinois. Since his parents Anton Hansen and Anna Dillingham had gotten married in Crystal Lake, Illinois and his maternal grandparents Stanislaus P. Dillingham and Eliza Minerva Hellenbolt were buried in the Union Cemetery also at Crystal Lake we decided we would go there to find the cemetery and get pictures of the headstone of his grandparents. This is some pictures from the Union Cemetery in Crystal Lake, Illinois. We had checked to see when the library there was open hoping to get two part days in the library there researching, but our flight got in so late we missed the first evening. We did get there early next morning and found a wedding announcement, and an article on the wedding of pop's parents, and obits for his grandparents and his mom's sister. We then headed for the cemetery and it is a pretty large cemetery and we did not have a clue where the tombstone of his grandparents were, so we parked the rental car and fanned out. I was in a section with nearly all German tombstones. Soon my sister yelled she found it! The tombstone was about THREE feet from the rental car, but facing the opposite direction away from the road. How we got so close just by accident was serendipity or maybe they wanted to be found. We later found that grandma's sister was also buried next to her parents, but no gravestone, and when we told our cousins they paid to have a headstone made for Abbie Fredelene Dillingham, but we have not been back to get a picture yet.

Wordless Wednesday Union Depot, Minneapolis, Minnesota

This is another postcard from my dad's collection, his older sister was in Minneapolis in the mid 1910s at school, so I think she sent it to him. The back is blank.

Saturday Night Fun Census Records

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and I hope that you do...), is to: 
 1) Determine which of your ancestors has appeared in the most census records - any census! (this topic was suggested by reader bgwiehle in an email several weeks ago. Thanks bg!). 
2) Tell us about it in your own blog post 

Well Probably Eliza Minerva (Hellenbolt) Dillingham, she was born in Wisconsin in 1845, so she appeared in the:
1850 Census Wisconsin
1860 Census Minnesota
1870 Census Minnesota
1880 Census Minnesota
1900 Census Illinois
1910 Census Illinois
1920 Census Illinois
1930 Census Illinois died 1933 Illinois. So 8 Federal census.

 My dad will probably set the record appearing in 10 federal census, but 6 are still closed. He did get to see himself in three census 1910 Minnesota age 3, 1920 Montana and 1930 Idaho, but he died in 2008 so he did not get to see himself in the 1940 census in Washington.

Wordless Wednesday High Bridge St. Paul, Minnesota

This is another postcard from my dad's postcard collection. His older sisters went to Minneapolis to school in the mid 1910s so I assume it was from them. I have several more of Minneapolis and Minnesota and will post them later.

Saturday Night Fun Newspaper

This week, your mission, should you decide to accept it (you'd better, i'm taking names!), is to:
 1) Go to the The Newspaper Clipping Generator (http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp) and create one or more articles using this tool.

2) You could generate articles that didn't appear in the newspaper, or articles you wish had appeared in the newspaper, or even your own obituary (in the future).

 3) Share your newspaper clippings with us as an image or a screen capture on your own blog, or a comment to this blog post, on a Facebook Status post, or a Google+ Stream post.

My Third Blogversary

Wow this year really flew by, hard to believe this is my third blogversary so soon, but I did start with my first post on July 13, 2009. I had been a blog helper for the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society Blog for a while before then, but I decided I wanted my own blog for my family and other posts that interested me.

To see the previous Blogversary Posts clock here. 
I picked this cake because this is the year we celebrated the opening of the 1940 census.
My series of articles on the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair seem to be my most popular posts this year, although a few more have been pretty popular also, like the 2012 Swimsuit Issue of the Carnival of Genealogy

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy Mistakes

Week 28: Mistakes. Genealogy research mistakes are wonderful learning experiences. They can be blessings when they show you how to improve your genealogy research. Which Week genealogy research mistake in your past has provided the most benefit to your present? How did you discover the mistake and what steps did you take to correct it? Sharing about these experiences will help others who are figuring out their own ancestral paths.

I agree you learn a lot from mistakes. Back before I started doing genealogy research on my family my sister decided we needed a family reunion. We contacted all the Hansen relatives we knew, and my Uncle Ralph had visited a bunch of the family and had some very old addresses for a bunch of Hansens we did not know. So we sent out a bunch of letters asking if anyone would be interested in a Hansen reunion. We got back a bunch of positive answers and one cousin sent some group sheets for the Hans Mikkelsen Family she had collected. All the sons were Hansen and five brothers came to Austin, Minnesota from Denmark. Four of the brothers never left Minnesota, but one had a wanderlust and moved first to Montana and finally to North Idaho close to where we now live in Spokane. The next batch of letters contained a copy of Hans Mikkelesen's group sheet and a couple of blank ones for each family to fill in and also make copies and forward to any other relatives. We asked to have the group sheets back by May so I could enter the information into a genealogy program and print out a book for the family reunion in July. Just as I was typing the information into the Enhanced Family Tree program we got a bunch more group sheets from a cousin. She had just got the letter, her husband was a minister and they had moved FIVE times since the address we got from Uncle Ralph and each church forwarded the letter so she finally got it.

Now for the mistakes, since the oldest person in the database was Hans Mikkelsen I entered him as number one in the Enhanced Family Tree program and proceeded  to enter the data from the 350 group sheets I got back. So can you guess what I did not know to do when I entered the data?? Sources, when we got the letters I just piled the group sheets in a pile and started typing, so while I got a lot of duplicates, I do not have a clue who sent which group sheet so the first 500 or so names in my database did not have a source. I have since added sources for many of them, but most are still unsourced. I should have entered me as number one in the file also. Now the third mistake, the Enhanced Family Tree did not have GEDCOM and soon it became evident that I needed a better genealogical program and so I found a program called Family Tree Journal a great DOS genealogical program and started retyping all the information I had entered into the Enhanced Family Tree program. A few months after I finished all the retyping a GEDCOM program was added to the Enhanced Family Tree program. So to summarize be sure any genealogical program has GEDCOM, enter yourself as number one in the database, and record your sources.

Saturday Night Fun d'Aboville numbers

1) Do you know what a d'Aboville numbering system is? A clear description of it is in the Encyclopedia of Genealogy here, and on Wikipedia here. Pretty neat numbering system, isn't it?
2) What are your own d'Aboville numbers for your four lines of your grandparents (starting with the first known person in each grandparent's paternal line)? Your genealogy software program may be able to help you with this (Family Tree Maker 2012, RootsMagic 5 and Legacy Family Tree 7.5 can, but Family Tree Maker 16 and earlier cannot).
 3) Tell us your own d'Aboville numbers for your four grandparent paternal lines in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, in a status line, note or comment on Facebook, or in a Google+ Plus Stream post.
 4) for extra credit, tell us how you figured out your d'Aboville numbers - which program, and the process.

Well my gene program does not do d'Arboville numbers, so I guess I will pass on figuring them out for my ancestors. I did look them up and have an example of them:
 1 Progenitor
     1.1 Child
        1.1.1 Grandchild
          1.1.1.1 Great-grandchild
          1.1.1.2 Great-grandchild
      1.1.2 Grandchild
    1.2 Child
      1.2.1 Grandchild
         1.2.1.1 Great-grandchild
         1.2.1.2 Great-grandchild
      1.2.2 Grandchild
         1.2.2.1 Great-grandchild
      1.2.3 Grandchild
      1.2.4 Grandchild
      1.2.5 Grandchild
      1.2.6 Grandchild
      1.2.7 Grandchild
      1.2.8 Grandchild
      1.2.9 Grandchild
      1.2.10 Grandchild

I am just glad that I do not have to use that numbering system, but I have read books that used that system so it is good to know how it works.