Genea-Christmas: The 12 Days of Christmas

A genealogy oriented version of the Twelve Days of Christmas is available on the Internet - see Kimberly Powell's site at http://genealogy.about.com/library/blchristmas-twelve.htm

I decided I would do my own based on using computer genealogy, my own needs and my own research:

On the 12th day of Christmas,

My true love gave to me --

Twelve RevWar pension files (12)

Eleven passenger lists (22)

Ten WorldConnect entries (30)

Nine message board postings (36)

Eight probate records (40)

Seven census pages (42)

Six deed abstracts (42)

Five blog readers (40)

Four marriage records (36)

Three family Bibles (30)

Two draft card images (22)

And a new name in my family tree. (12)

I've put the total number in parenthesis of each item - if you sing the song all the way through, going one number at a time.

My true love is a busy girl, isn't she? But, but, but ... that would take all the fun out of the search, wouldn't it?

My early Christmas gift - from the past

I am floating on air this morning - I am really excited about a really unexpected "gift".

As I mentioned, we are cleaning out the garage and remodeling some of the house. There is a 20 foot long bin out in the driveway and the temptation is to take all the boxes put up in the garage rafters back in 1975 and dump them in the bin, sight unseen. We've resisted that so far.

So there is this box hiding in the corner on the top shelf of the rafters...and it's falling apart. The bottom drops out of it as I bring it to the garage floor. What can this be?

Treasures in the box include:

1) All of my report cards from elementary school through high school, plus some yearbooks. Also some early "artwork." I was really into maps!

2) The scorebooks from the 1960 to 1975 Little League/Pony League seasons that my dad and I coached, plus some pictures and programs.

3) Many newspaper clippings from the 1940 to 1975 time period - cut out.

4) Lots of old maps from National Geographic and other sources. Did I say that I really loved maps?

5) Three old books - "The Analytical Speller" by Edwards & Warren, 1867; "Common Sense Applied to Numbers, The Word System," 1874; "Graded Classics Fourth Reader," 1902.

6) A daily journal from 1928-1930 written by my great-grandmother, Della (Smith) Carringer.

I'm looking forward to perusing the yearbooks and report cards, reading the old books, and transcribing the journal.

They say "luck is the residue of design" - well, I feel really lucky today; I'm not sure what "design" there was here, other than cleaning out the garage. Now there's more stuff in the genea-cave in its own little box, waiting for the treasure hunt!

I'm almost ready for Christmas

I'm a bit winded from the frenetic activity of preparing for Christmas, sorting and throwing out collected stuff (not genealogy!) as we start our home remodel, shopping for kitchen cabinets and appliances for the remodel, and from rooting on my Chargers.

My major preparations for Christmas are almost over. I worked the last four weeks on:

1) Writing and printing the family Christmas letter - two pages with photos - that we snail mail to about 100 people. This includes making the envelope labels, writing the letter, and printing them two-sided - about a one week job with editsd and rewrites. BTW, if you want a copy of this, please email me at rjseaver(at)cox.net and i'll send a PDF version.

2) Writing and printing the 16-page Seaver-Richmond Journal, which I described here. Writing the text and inserting the pictures is about a two week job, including editing. I print this on my HP color printer at home, and usually have a 10% scrap rate as I (or the printer) mess up the double sided pages. This year, I lost only one sheet of paper (out of 400). The secret was, I think, to let the pages dry out for a day before printing the second sides. I collated them and stapled them. This was essentially a 3 day job to print it all out.

3) Preparing the 9x12 envelopes with the family letter, the Journal, a Christmas card, and, in some cases, a page of photos, then labelling and stamping the works took several hours last night. They go in the mail tomorrow. Whew.

So that's done, and now the major struggle is to find some Christmas gifts for my Angel Linda, who works so hard and helps so many people. I think she wants clothes and jewelry, and not computer related things this year.

One more chore - add the downloaded Christmas songs to my iPod! And the downloaded Genealogy podcasts from the Guys, Myrtle and the FGS conference. Then I can listen to them on our trip north to see the kids and grandkids over the holidays. My wife can listen to Dr. Laura, and i'll listen to my iPod. Does Rush have a free podcast? I'll have to check.

Are all of your Christmas chores done? What do you have left to do? Do you like to shop at Christmas? I love to go to the shopping centers and see the families with their kids go see Santa.

Fond farewells - all about eulogies

There is an interesting article about the art of writing and delivering eulogies in The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper today. The link is here (I'm not sure how permanent it is).

The article tells about Cyrus Copeland, who wrote a book in 2004 called "Farewell, Godspeed" with 64 eulogies of famous people, and now has a sequel called "A Wonderful Life" with 50 eulogies.

His best advice for writing a eulogy is:

“People think eulogies are dour, tear-streaked things, but they're not,” Copeland said in a phone interview from New York, where he lives. “The good ones are frequently very inspiring and occasionally very funny.”

But what makes a good one? Copeland offered some tips:

Open strongly. “If you start with 'Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today' you might as well give the audience a sleeping pill,” Copeland said. “That kind of opening is a testament to the lack of creativity that is sure to follow.”

As an example of an opening line that grabs the audience's attention, he cited Madonna's eulogy for Gianni Versace, the fashion designer: “I slept in Gianni Versace's bed.”

Be truthful. There's nothing worse than a snow job that makes the guy out to be a saint when everybody knows he wasn't, Copeland said. It's OK to mention foibles, because they highlight our shared humanity, he added.

Tell stories. “We all want to know our presence made a difference in people's lives,” Copeland said, “and telling stories is one way to show that imprint.”

The article has sidebars, including one for the shortest eulogy:

Rev. Louis Saunders offered a one-sentence farewell to an assassin: "Mrs. Oswald tells me her son Lee Harvey was a good boy and that she loved him, and today, Lord, we commit his spirit to your divine care."

The best eulogy for a matinee idol:

Larry Gelbart on Gregory Peck: "For openers, he had the kind of face that belonged on money."

The most brutally honest:

Rev. Howard Moody, talking about comedian Lenny Bruce: "There are three characteristics of his that I recall: his destructiveness, his unbearable moralism, and his unstinting pigheadedness."

Interesting and useful article. Having written eulogies for my mother, two aunts, an uncle and a cousin, I tend to concentrate on the good things about the person, with lots of adjectives. I need to add some stories, I guess.

Honesty in Birth Certificates

An article in today's San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper describes the story of the birth of Molly Buck on 6 January 2003. The link to the story is here (I'm not sure if this will be available for very long).

The funny part is that Molly Elizabeth Buck's birth certificate (shown in the newspaper, parents names and birthplaces, and home address included - I hope they got permission!) says:

Place of Birth: Automobile

Street Address: Hwy 163 near Hwy 8 Intersection

The funny part of the story is that the parents planned on giving Molly the Toyota 4Runner that she was born in to her on her 16th birthday - but the Toyota was stolen some time ago.

Genea-Christmas - "O Family Tree" Song

As we approach the Christmas season, I'm going to use some of the material I've collected for many years.

Tonight - the song "O Family Tree" - sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum" or "O Christmas Tree"

O Family Tree, O Family Tree
How sturdy are your branches.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
How sturdy are your branches.
Through many years in ages past
You have shown the strength to last.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
How sturdy are your branches.

O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
There is so much for you to tell.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
There is so much for you to tell.
Reveal to me your mystery
As I research my ancestry.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
There is so much for you to tell.

O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
Show to me my heritage.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
Show to me my heritage.
I learn from you so I can see
A part of you lives on in me.
O Family Tree, O Family Tree,
Show to me my heritage.

-- Author unknown --

If someone knows the author of this, please let me know.

More problems at Rootsweb message boards

I posted on Thursday about the more visible problems at the Rootsweb / Ancestry message boards. After two more days of random playing with the system, there are other issues - more than I noted before. And there are some things that are pretty good.

My new observations:

1) When you click on the post submitter name, you may get an email address (as an image) of a non-Ancestry subscriber. If the submitter is an Ancestry subscriber then you can click on the Public Profile link and see their profile and email, if they have chosen to let you see it.

I decided I would make a public profile on Friday - and I did, with a picture, some notes, lots of detail. I worked 30 minutes on it.

The damn thing is gone today at 10 AM PST - poof! My public profile is blank (Gee, maybe I am just a figment of their imagination? Heck, I paid up.). Humph. So I wrote their HelpDesk a nasty-gram. Now I'll never have a public profile, I fear.

UPDATE: At 10:52 AM PST, the Public Profile is there. Perhaps they were worknig on thier servers or something.

2) The list of recent threads on a given message board still takes up about 40% of my screen width. They modified the list of thread titles so you can see the entire subject line, rather than a truncated single line. And they fixed the user-selected number of threads to list - you can choose 10, 25 or 50. I chose 25.

3) On a given message board, the threads are listed by the date of the last post on each thread, rather than the date of the first post of the thread. I like this.

4) If you click on a thread list, you can choose to see "flat view" (which is the content of each reply) or "thread view" (which is just the title of the replies, indented as required. I like the "flat view."

5) I also input over 40 "favorite" message boards yesterday - and these were saved (go figure?). I input message boards for both surnames and localities - the ones I visit on occasion. Using this, I don't have to save a bunch in my Favorites list on Internet Explorer. However, my list of favorites is not alphabetized - they look randomly placed. The county boards are not identified by state. I would prefer that they be alphabetized by surname and then by state/county.

6) One of the major complaints I've heard is that you cannot, at this time, click on the post submitter and see what other posts they have written on all Ancestry/Rootsweb message boards. This was very useful to many researchers, as it provided more insight into the research capabilities and surnames that the person was searching.

Check Hugh Watkins blog for more observations about the Ancestry/Rootsweb changes.

In addition to the Rootsweb Newsroom blog I linked to on Thursday, there is also an "Ancestry Improvements" message board at http://boards.ancestry.com/topics.ancestry.ancimprovements/mb.ashx. There are many complaints there also, most of them valid IMHO.

Jerome Murat video

We interrupt your genealogy reading to bring you an amazing video - a performance by Jerome Murat in France. Not genealogy...unless you have Murat cousins, I guess.

Watch it at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xf9oo_jerome-murat

Breath-taking. amazing. How does he do that?

A beautiful life - Ellen Goodman's mother

I'm kind of a softie when it comes to the obituaries, and I appreciate the effort put into a really good obituary.

Here is a link to columnist Ellen Goodman's mother's obituary in the Boston Globe, titled The abiding legacy of my mother -- the listener. It tells the story of her life, and her legacy.

She describes her mother's teachings:

My mother, born before suffrage, before World War I and World War II, before the feminine mystique and feminism, taught me everything I know of family values.

She taught me that family came first. She taught me to make cheesecake and keep peace. She taught me that a real home was a place where you were welcome for Sunday brunch and conversation. She taught me to accept your children's life choices without criticism and with confidence in their judgment.

She taught me patience -- although I am afraid I never passed the finals in that class.

The last paragraph:

So my mother's gift for family, my mother's talent for empathy, was passed down from one generation to the next and the next. It is her abiding legacy.

Read the whole thing. Many of us have gone through this already, and it is often difficult to capture the soul of your loved one in a few paragraphs. Ellen, of course, is a professional writer, and she does this one very well.

Genealogy fraud has a long history

One of the major sources of Seaver genealogy data, especially for families outside of Massachusetts, was a book called "The Seaver Genealogy," published in 1924 by Jesse Montgomery Seaver in Philadelphia. He corresponded with many Seaver families found in city directories or other records to generate this book. Based on my own research, I have found only a few mistakes in his Seaver surname research, considering he did not have access to the census and other records unless he visited the location of each family.

Jesse Montgomery Seaver also wrote many other surname books, some with very common names. Apparently he was one of the first genealogy scam artists, as shown at http://www.webnests.com/Chase/chronicles/genealogyfraud.htm.

A newspaper article in August 1930 includes:

"J. Montgomery Seaver, thirty seven, president of the
American Historical-Genealogical Society, Broad and Norris sts., was confronted withState and Federal charges today.

George C. Baker, superintendent of mails at the post office announced a fraud order against Seaver's organization had been issued at Washington yesterday. At the same time Seaver was being held in $500 bail for court on charges growing out of a collision.

Post office inspectors investigating the Historical Genealogical Society's activities reported he had arranged a plan for selling books purporting to give the records of various families back to the time of William the Conqueror.

After the investigation Horace J. Donnelly, solicitor of the Post Office Department at Washington, reported the plan to be "a scheme for obtaining money through the mails by means
of false and fraudulent promises."

Read the whole article. Poor Jesse got caught. I don't know what happened to him after this.

I fear that old Jesse M. was a descendant of Robert Seaver (1608-1683, immigrant in 1634 to Roxbury MA) and a cousin of mine, although he could not find enough records to prove the connection.

My purpose here is to call attention to him so that other researchers don't rely on his fraudulent works. Researcher beware!