Celebrations: Happy Mother's Day

Bernice Evangeline Grenfell Currey (1902 - 1980) and me.

[San Diego, 1947 from my personal collection]

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Sunday Drive: Currey

I love this photo, "No Parking" sign and all. The father who raised me always had a Dodge truck and this one may have been his first.

[New Truck April 2, 1935, from the Currey photo album in my personal collection]

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Fantastic Find: Free Digitized Newspapers!

Taxpayer dollars at work!

I subscribe to some great online newpaper databases (Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and GenealogyBank), and was already aware of the free Chronicling America newspaper project from the Library of Congress, but I just found another great place to look if the above sources don't get you what you need: The U.S. Newspaper Program page (National Endowment for the Humanities).

The fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands each have a page with that state or territories digitization efforts, including newspapers.  I had already used the California and Oregon versions without processing that it was part of a larger national program.

For example, looking in the Oklahoma digitized newspapers, I finally found a few more clues about my husband's 2nd great grandmother, Louise (Malcha) Buchholz.  The last record I found for her or husband Ernest August Buchholz was in 1905 in Kansas.  Her daughters Dora and Ida lived or married in the Dewey, Washington, Oklahoma area between 1907 and 1911, yet I couldn't find Louise anywhere on a census.  I just assumed that Louise and Ernest had probably died before 1910.

But lo! The Bartlesville, Oklahoma, newspapers was actually online and digitized, which I haven't found anywhere else.

Here and here are links for this wanted ad

She would have been 48, and she was born in Germany. So now I know that she lived until at least June 1910, and that Ernest had either died before then, or they were at least separated by then.  That's more than I knew before!

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Celebrations: VE Day in London

In honor of today's 70th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, take a look at this British Pathe film of Londoners celebrating the event.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Family Friday: Slater

My birth mother Alta Mae Slater (1917-1986) seems to be reading to her brothers Jack (1923-1943) and Jim (1919-1984) in this photo almost certainly taken in Niwot, Colorado.

[Courtesy of Olive Kennedy]

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Throwback Thursday: Disneyland 2009

Has it been over 6 years already??
My husband and son in line at the Dumbo ride at Disneyland, 2009 (we were celebrating Marc's 7th birthday).

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Fantastic Find: Burned Counties Research

William T. Slater, my maternal great great great grandfather, is believed to have applied for citizenship in 1818 in Jefferson County, Indiana, and someone with this name appears in An Index to Indiana Naturalization Records. But when I decided to take a closer look at the repository of the original records in the Madison courthouse a few years ago, this is what I found:

[Madison, Indiana courthouse fire from south side. Spire collapse. 20 May 2009]

Although the fire was confined to the dome and cupola of the brick building, there was major water damage to the records stored on the first floor and in the basement. I haven't been able to find out the extent of that damage.

FamilySearch has a great web page listing research strategies for alternate sources of information in place of lost records.

The phrase "burned counties" was first used for research in Virginia where many county records were destroyed in courthouse fires, or during the Civil War. The strategies for researching places where a local courthouse or repository was wiped out by fire, tornado, war, flood, hurricane, earthquake, insects, rodents, mold, neglect, foxing, theft, tsunami, or cleaning-streak clerks are useful in similar situations all around the United States, Canada, and throughout the world.

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.