Blog
September 4, 2021
I’ve been working with some families lately, helping them with their genealogical research. I love to help them explore the historical context of their ancestor’s lives and the question usually comes up about how to share their trees with other family members. I’ve worked with a few different methods to share. One client wrote out the history of each branch and we created a beautiful video where she read the history which was interwoven with lots of photos and elements that showed the descendants of each branch. I’ve also done several genealogy book. Some have trees in them which can be difficult if yours is particularly large. But there are ways to display each branch in a section and then focus in on each node. Adding photos, stories and other things to describe each ancestor provides a lot of interesting information. And of course an actual tree in the form […]
April 21, 2021
Some people are just drawn to artifacts of the past. Entire books have been written about ephemera found in someone else’s trash. So it was not a complete surprise when I received a message on Ancestry from a woman who had found an autograph album that originally belonged to a cousin of mine and dating from 1934. She told me she had found the album in a dumpster along with some other items in a bag. That she had looked up the name of the young woman whose album it was and found her in my family tree and would I be interested in receiving it. Of course I would! A few days later, it showed up in the mail along with a beautiful and touching letter about how pleased she was to be able to reunite the album with its family. Autograph albums were apparently a popular keepsake item […]
October 11, 2020
My grandmother, Esther Kronenberg, is in the front row, the third on the left from the center gentleman in a dark suit. I’ve seen this photo 100 times. My dad put a sticky note with an arrow over the class, pointing to his mother’s head. Bronx High School, graduating class of 1922. Today was the first day I have really given some consideration to what that meant for her and her family. Esther was the first generation in her family born in the United States. She was born in 1904. Her father was a shoemaker from Koden Poland. My father told me that he was a learned man. Perhaps not formally educated, but always had his nose in a book. Esther’s mother Anna was a housewife, no education at all, guided by superstition and concern about the “evil eye.” According to my father, she was frequently found throwing away or […]
June 16, 2020
Oh my goodness. I keep meaning to post and I keep writing blog articles in my head and somehow a year has passed since I’ve written anything. As they say, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions!” I hope not, for my own sake. While social distancing, I have been continuing my project of re-scanning all my family photos, putting them into archival pages in an album and organizing the digital files with meta-tags so that everyone will be identified and put in the right family folders. I may have mentioned that I actually scanned all my family photos back in 2008. But at that time, I did the project for my parents and the goal was to just get them digitized. Now that my parents are gone, I’ve been able to go through the images, throw out the ones of stuff that have no import to the […]