Wordless Wednesday Boat at Lake

Another photo from my grand aunt Latisha Vanderpool's photo album.

Saturday Night Fun Technology

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Julie Goucher, on her Anglers Rest blog, has a long-running weekly blog theme called The Book Of Me.  This week's prompts are about Technology.  We'll use that this week!

2)  For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - please address these issues:

• What technology changes did your ancestors see?
• What technology changes have you seen?
• Did your family own one of those early changes? - such as television
• Do you like or dislike technology?
• What do you think has been the best technological change in your lifetime and 
• historically?

1. Well I have a lot of farmers for ancestors, many of the New England ancestors were ship builders and cabinet makers, and so the biggest technology changes, were the steam ships and railroads. My grandparents went from horses for farming to tractors and from steam trains to diesel powered trains. My dad probably saw the most changes, his father ran a creamery and they used horses to deliver milk. Pop said the horse would follow him down the street as he delivered milk to the doors of the customers. Later he worked in logging camps in north Idaho, first buying a Model T truck to haul logs, then a Model A truck and finally a Ford V8 Truck. He got to see World War II in Africa and Italy, and he flew several times in jets going to his army air corps reunions.
2. As a baby boomer I remember the time before TV, but we got one pretty early, and we got a color TV later on. I took classes in Fortran programming in college, and bought my first computer in 1984. By the early 1990s I was a chat host on Tuesdays on the Prodigy Genealogy Bulletin Board helping people with GEDCOMs, and their Danish research and general computer problems, since then I have really not done a lot to even keep up with the latest technology. Do I like technology? Some I like and some I do not like.
3. I think the internet has been the best technological change in my life time, but the auto historically. Think how easy it is for us to travel hundreds of miles in a day verses how long it took our ancestors to travel that same distance.

Funeral Card Friday Carol Ann Louallen

Carol was our neighbor from when I was very little till she got married, she will be missed by all.

Wordless Wednesday Rocky Beach

Another photo from my grand aunt Latisha Vanderpool's photo album.

Saturday Night Fun Memories

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Judy Russell asked six questions in her Keynote address at RootsTech to determine if audience members knew certain family stories about their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  She demonstrated very well that family stories are lost within three generations if they are not recorded and passed on to later generations.

2)  This week, I want you to answer Judy's six questions, but about YOUR own life story, not your ancestors.  Here are the questions:

a)  What was your first illness as a child?

b)  What was the first funeral you attended?

c)  What was your favorite book as a child?

d)  What was your favorite class in elementary school?

e)  What was your favorite toy as a child?

f)  Did you learn how to swim, and where did you learn?

a) Well I don't remember my first illness, I have an older sister and she brought home all the childhood illnesses when she was in kindergarten so I would have been about 3 years old when I got the measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the flu. Because of this I got an award for perfect attendance in grade school at the end of sixth grade, as did a few other classmates.

b) I was taken to the funeral of my grandfather Charles Rupert Kelly a few months before my 6th birthday, I did not want to go, but my grandma wanted me to see him in his casket.

c) I read almost everything in sight after I learned to read, did not like fiction very well, but loved non fiction, travel books, etc.

d)  I was thinking of math class, but the example Randy used was a grade, so I guess 5th grade, as I learned a lot that year and had fun making life for a student teacher miserable.

e) I was given a Lionel train from my parents and really liked that, had about half the basement in trains on a couple of sheets of plywood. Still have the trains. Found out years later my dad worked on a cousins car on weekends so he could buy that train for me.

f) Well my mom was trained as a lifeguard and worked for a while at the Hillyard pool, I took lessons there at the Hillyard Pool, and also at the Red Cross swimming lessons at the resort on Twin Lakes in Idaho. 

Happy Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day, over the last few years I posted Valentine Postcards my dad collected from about 1910-1915 here . There are no more valentine cards left, so be sure to go and look at those I have already posted.

Wordless Wednesday Ladies on the Porch

Another photo from my grand aunt Latisha Vanderpool's photo album.

IRS is Working on Identity Theft

There has been a lot of talk about the social security death index being used for identity theft and yet it is actually a tool that can be used to stop identity theft. I have read several blogs and all of them keep saying the IRS should be doing more to stop it.
Well as a tax preparer I know that for years a tax was rejected from E-Filing if the date of death of a spouse stated on the income tax was wrong, so I knew that the IRS was checking the death index for the death of a spouse, but as far as I could tell a death of a child was not being checked.
In 2010 the IRS started using a new computer system to handle income taxes, the old system was so old that they had to hire retired programmers each year to do updates on that old system, new programmers do not get taught the programming language those computers used. The new system was to be much faster, they told us preparers that they would eventually be able to get refunds back to the taxpayers in three days, but what I liked was the turn around time for returns I had sent in electronically dropped from one day to less than an hour. That first year they only processed about half of the returns filed electronically, and most of them were the simpler forms, but in 2011 all the returns went through the new system, and the turn around time for us was slower than the previous year, but still a lot faster than using the old computer and refunds were a little slower that year.
One seminar I went to this year taught by an IRS agent he said that the IRS now has more than 1000 agents just working on identity theft, and that number seems to be growing even though the IRS has been reducing total staff due to budget cuts from Congress.
Each tax season we get a list of reject codes from our software, and this year is no different, but the list this year has a few new codes for us, and guess what number one on our list of new codes is?

Situation: The return is rejected due to one of the SSNs used in that return being “systemically locked”

Examples shown below; this is not the full list

IND-941 IRS reject -- The Spouse SSN in the Return Header has been locked because Social Security Administration records indicate the number belongs to a deceased individual.

 

Being locked means that social security number can not be used on an electronically filed tax return ever again, and I will bet a paper return using that number will get special attention from one of those 1000+ IRS agents that are working on identity theft. I just hope it does not slow down an income tax from a surviving spouse that is filing a return after the death of the other spouse. 

So the IRS is working on stopping identity theft and lets hope they can stop it without further hindering genealogists from using the SSDI.

Wordless Wednesday Ladies and Aprons

Another photo from my grand aunt Latisha Vanderpool's photo album.

Saturday Night Fun Super Bowl 48

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  The Super Bowl is on Sunday, 2 February 2014 in the USA.  The Denver Broncos are playing the Seattle Seahawks for the National football League championship.  The winners get to go to Disney World.  

2)  Predict the score for this game.  You have to predict the winning team and the closest to the actual score (point differential summed for both teams) to be the winner.  The winner of this contest gets announced next week in a Genea-Musings blog post.  

3)  Tell a story about your experiences playing football or watching professional football games.  Did you go to football games? Who in your family was the real fan of the game?  What were the pre-game routines?  How do you, or your family, react to good plays or bad plays, or wins or losses?

2)  Seahawks 28 Broncos 24

3)  Well I did not play much football, in junior high we played football in PE class, and by then most all my classmates had started to grow a lot and I was still small. When I started high school I was 4 feet tall and 100 pounds as a sophomore, most of the kids were a foot or more taller and 50 to 75 pounds heavier than I was, so I did not play football except in PE class and I was very poor at that. I did play clarinet in the band and we played at all the football games and marched at halftime for the "home" games. We got in for free by wearing our band uniforms, the uniforms were heavy wool and since I was small my uniform was pretty loose so I could put on a lot of layers under the uniform to keep warm.
No one in my family was a real fan of football, we did watch the Seahawks if we were not busy doing something else, but never dropped everything to watch them. I guess not being a football fan in high school carried over to adult life.