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I opened up my genealogy file for the first time in months upon seeing this thread just now and it's in a poor state. I'm half-tempted to start it again, as bone-headed as that would be. There are partly transcribed documents, no way to tell which people need researching, records located but not yet added to the database… and since I didn't realise I would be abandoning it, I didn't leave myself any notes about progress. To be fair, I've gone about as far back as I can without international travel or branching sideways to people I barely care about. And I'm not doing it alone; my father has a less rigorous tree of his own on Ancestry somewhere and a cousin made a poster of our grandfather's current descendants, which looks nice even though it's full of dating errors. Considering the objectives I had when I started – identify people I only hear about in my mother's stories and Christmas cards, and find out where my parents' surnames came from – it's as complete as it needs to be. Plus there's not much excitement in our tree - no convicts, no royalty, and a minor 19th-century composer who was long-assumed to be family turned out to be unrelated. Though we have had a master criminal or two: quote:"Railway fireman GW was proud of the garden he created on land by the track between West Minster and Queenborough. He grew fine crops, including a special lettuce called Ryders Long Standing, but produce was trampled or disappeared almost daily. After following a trail of earth, it appeared three men on night shift at the Gas Works were responsible. At Sheerness magistrates court JB pleaded quilty, but VH and HH denied involvement. They bragged no need to steal as they were earning 36 shillings a week [£1 16 shillings; ~200USD in 2016?] and able to afford food for the family. So the chairman of the bench decided they would have no problem in paying a fine of £1 each with 11 shillings and 8 pence costs."
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Oct 23, 2016 08:25
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 10:40 |
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My father has occasionally mentioned a family tale about one of his grandfathers, Henry, getting a medal in WWI, but we could never find anything about it. Earlier this year he managed to get in touch with Henry's daughter, who gave a description of the medal itself (held by her brother, who isn't online), and we found out it was the Military Medal (awarded for "acts of gallantry and devotion to duty under fire"). Better yet, the medal has the text "H.T. Lastname" and his regimental number. I don't know much about military records, so when I went looking for more information and came up empty I moved on to the next mystery, though my father remained curious about what he did to receive it. Tried again today and found several records with the correct regimental number but under 'Harry Lastname' instead. 'Harry' signed up to a regiment on the other side of the country, about as far as possible from where we lived. If we didn't literally have the medal as evidence I'd assume it was a different person! Disappointingly, there's not much information - It looks like his service record might have been among those destroyed in the WW2 bombing. Still, one step closer - now we know what units he served in (ed: via the Victory/British War Medal record), and I get to redo a bunch of other searches with Harry Lastname just in case... edit 2: Found him in the (Edinburgh?) Gazette in October 1918, so I guess it was not long before that? Hitting dead ends otherwise. edit 3: Ah, in the London Gazette a few days earlier, that makes sense. Unfortunately apparently there's no chance of the citation existing, but checking the battalion war diary as a last resort. final edit: Listed in the diary in June with four others, identifying details only. Guess that's the end of that then. uvar fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Nov 2, 2016 |
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Nov 2, 2016 09:00
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I passed on my findings about Henry/Harry to my father, but neglected to point out that the citations were gone, so he went looking and found one anyway! From The 25th Division in Flanders and France by Malcom Kincaid-Smith: quote:...Pte. Collins and Pte. Nevitt as stretcher bearers were most noticeable and thoroughly deserved the decorations awarded them. It's not a lot, but it's more than I had expected to find at this point, and is compatible with the rest of the legend that I'd forgotten about (that he got the MM for rescuing an officer who got the VC, which is trivial to disprove, but maybe inflated from a Military Cross or something). Despite the book being public domain and digitized by Google, they only have a limited-preview version of a more recent publication so I'm slowly scraping another source and will eventually find out the context. But looks to be ~25 April 1918 in Kemmel, which is apparently part of the Battle of Lys/4th Battle of Ypres.
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Nov 6, 2016 11:13
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Powaqoatse posted:Wow nice! Presumably that bit is based on the now-lost WWI service records then? Something like that - it was first published in 1918, and the author served as an officer elsewhere in the division. The stretcher-bearer stuff is probably a summary of the original citation.
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Nov 7, 2016 00:27
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Jaguars! posted:OK, so one of my ancestors has a rare surname - Legass. Presumably this is an anglicized version of a name from somewhere in Europe. Any good sites to find out where the name originates or predominates? I think maybe the most likely transliteration would be french - Le Gasse or similar. She married into an Irish family but Irish BDM records didn't really show anything. I think this will be a bit of a dead end, unless I get extremely lucky and find the right passenger list. I don't know about the rest of the continent, but The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland was published about a month ago, and is kind-of-searchable for free. The closest match it has is Legassick, which is "unexplained, possibly Huguenot". (Index page, you can get entries from the search preview if you're cunning/patient) Ancestry.com records look like probably French, but I don't have access to those sections from my home computer. And I never really know how trustworthy these kinds of sites are: https://www.houseofnames.com/legasse-family-crest No developments with my tree - father has got distracted with rebuilding his old car, and I'm busy with work. I guess it's never too late for my mother to have a turn...
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Dec 13, 2016 07:58
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Cpt.Wacky posted:I'm looking at scanning in a lot of family photos. What systems for organizing them have worked well? I found this open source tool called Gramps, is it any good? fake edit: Oh boy why do I always write so much. I really didn't mean for this to be so long and didactic, sorry about that, please enjoy my drivel! I use and like Gramps - if you know what an open source program is you'll probably find it straightforward enough, though properly citing every tiny fact seems to take too many clicks. I particularly like the mapping/geography component, though I haven't checked payware stuff for a long time so maybe that's widespread now. But the purpose of the media component isn't a photo album, it's fairly specific, i.e. adding photos to people or events, or linking documents as evidence for specific facts. I wouldn't think of using it as the primary catalogue for a large photo collection. Apart from the limitations of the program, it stores information entirely separate from the images, which didn't work with the system I had for all my other photos. I prefer to put the information into the photo metadata (date, location, caption, people tagging, etc.) and duplicating some of that in Gramps seemed pointless or impossible (you can't add the location of a photograph, only attach it to a record at the location). The only particular benefit IMO is that it allows for less specific dating ("about 1908", "estimated before 1930", "February 1962"). I've sketched out out my system below, but nobody I know has bothered to get anywhere near as detailed. It depends on the size and quality and meaningfulness of your collection, whether you want to treat it separately from the digital photos that you surely already have, whether you know anything about the photos or just have a shoebox of undated & uncaptioned portraits, you get the idea. 90% of my collection is post-1950s 4x6-or-smaller prints in envelopes and albums, mostly already sorted by event or theme by my parents, so following their system worked well for me. When I scanned my photos I assigned them a unique code based on their physical location (usually as simple as A13-22 for the 22nd image in the 13th album, putting a tiny sticker on the album to identify it later, but generally not writing on the photo) and made a spreadsheet/database with information about the physical copy - what Album 13 looks like, its current location, what format A13-22 is supposed to be (film/transparency, color/B&W, size), if it's one of the photos that was printed on textured material and won't scan properly, if it's damaged, any information written on the back, a one-line description of the image, etc. - essentially, it's a focussed-but-lazy replica of the local museum's catalogue system, which is not free to use and would be massive overkill for this kind of project anyway. I entered this information as I scanned them, and stored the files in the same layout (e.g. filename A13-22 in a folder called A13). Then I just treat them like all my other photographs and add metadata eventually where possible with Lightroom and GeoSetter (beta version, not the years-old "stable" one), referring to the database for reference instead of the original. It's not the quickest process, but I end up with a digital album full of information about its contents and a database of information about the physical originals and not too much overlap between them. Personally, a bigger mistake than anything to do with my cataloguing was sticking with my "home-office" scanner - it worked fine but saving for a few months and spending much more initially would have probably been faster and easier. But that's maybe because I was spoiled by the museum's equipment, which was definitely out of my price range. P.S. Get some gloves, disposable nitrile or washable cotton or whatever.
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Dec 17, 2016 01:33
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 10:40 |
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Cpt.Wacky posted:That's all helpful, thank you. Gramps looks like the average open source project with a less than ideal UI and should be useful for the actual genealogy work. quote:Do you do anything special with the reverse side of the photo? I'm sure some are going to have handwritten notes, and I probably won't be able to decipher a lot of the old-timey cursive handwriting. I could scan it in too, and just give it the same file name as the front side and append -reverse or something. quote:I was a little wary of putting too much info into the metadata for photos so it's nice to hear from someone that it works. How do you go about searching through the metadata, is it just dependent on the features of the software you're using? As for photo metadata, I was lucky if I actually knew what was going on in the photo, let alone worrying about putting too much in. Standards were important - store everything in EXIF/IPTC, basically. Lightroom worked well for that but I'm sure there are good free alternatives. I used to use Windows Live Photo Gallery for tagging my digital photos years ago, which was very much the opposite, and don't want to have to repeat rescuing my metadata ten years from now. Information shows up in Windows Explorer if the photos don't have any Windows-preferred fields, so search generally works okay. quote:Have you found any methods that work for getting extended family to help identify people in photos? I can imagine most of mine are not very tech savvy and it could be a real mess when they respond that the one with people by a picnic table has Uncle Bob and Cousin Vinny in it, and there's multiple photos with picnic tables and you can't tell if Vinny is on the left or right. Not to mention sending potentially hundreds of photos as attachments. Now that I'm thinking about it, doesn't Google Photos allow people to add comments? They'd just have to have a google account I think. Some of them are old enough they don't even use computers. I guess I could mail prints of the scanned photos and ask them to write notes on the back and mail them back?  Museum-opinions suggest that in-person conversations where everyone is looking at the same photos is the best option, but even that has limits. My parents were nostalgic when I started but there's only so many times you can ask "Okay, do you have any comments about this one?" before it gets a little tiring (even if they do, taking notes slows things down, and recording conversations isn't great and takes up more time and effort later). Because my parents emigrated when I was younger we don't have much contact with the rest of our family anyway (which is the main reason I started my tree in the first place, funnily enough). So yeah, no idea really.
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Dec 31, 2016 16:43
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