WANDERINGS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT
BY GAYLE STUART
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Have you all kept your New Years’ resolutions? I think we all have hopes in the new year that we are going to do better with things that we want to work on. Writing our family history, cleaning closets, drawers, craft projects and dieting, the list goes on and on.
Maybe if we didn’t try to change everything all at once, we would do better. I have been working at some file drawers in the office and didn’t realize how long it had been since I last worked at this. I have 2 huge sacks of shredded paper already.
Our goal for these couple months of cold weather should maybe be to pick one of our families and see if we can get it organized, so anyone can pick it up in the future and understand what the history is of that branch of the family.
It’s likely that we all have a folder with tidbits that need sorting and put into some kind of order.
I have been going through pictures of projects around the farm, trying to remember the year and if we can find the cost when sorting old bills and checks. Our son looks at this notebook every once in awhile. I have found several bills from when our house was built 75 years ago. Looking at them, it doesn’t look like it was very expensive, but thinking back to that time, it was the going rate.
SOME NOTES OF INTEREST
At the Danish Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn, Iowa an exhibit starting February 22 and going to September 1 will feature Schleswig-Holstein: Turmoil on the Danish-German Border.
Many immigrants from the Schleswig-Holstein region, both Danish and German settled in our local Walnut area and in the rest of Iowa. The exhibit promises to teach visitors the history of this region and its impact on immigrant communities in the Midwest.
Congress recently voted to impose restrictions on access to the Social Security Death Index to prevent ID fraud. As a result we will no longer have access to death information for persons who have died within the past 3 years.
Family Search.org has recently added New York passenger & crew lists, 1909-1957, and Canadian passenger lists 1881-1922, and New York passenger lists from 1820-1891, this is before Ellis Island.
An interesting video on how to read the unreadable tombstones is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVBMNVqGhck&sns=em. The use of just plain flour is a simple way to be able to read the inscription on a marker. You put the flour over the part where the printing is, fill in the writing, brush off excess flour with a broom. After reading, brush as much off as possible and then allow nature to take care of the rest. If you read comments on this method, there are objections to it, just like other methods that people have suggested. Just be sure not to use abrasive cleaners.
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