Genealogy Resolutions for 2016 and Genealogy Connections from 2015

Sent to Wallis W. Wood from Aunt Rachel Ellen Wood Kirby, 1914

Thank you, dear cousins, for making 2015 another year of genealogy connections. I am grateful to so many cousins and family friends for their friendship and help in tracing our Birk/Burk, Chazan, Farkas, Kunstler, Jacobs, Larimer, Mahler, Mandel, Markell, McClure, McKibbin, Mitav, Roth, Schwartz, Slatter, Steiner, Waldman, Weiss, and Wood ancestry. Sharing memories, photos, and documents brings our families closer together and brings the past into focus for all of us!

As of 1/1/15, my activity on Find a Grave

My genealogy resolutions for 2016:

• Continue posting grave photos to Find A Grave. Whenever I visit a cemetery, I photograph as many graves as I can on my way to and from the sections I'm seeking, and around the graves I visit. So far, I've posted just over 800 grave photos. 
• Continue linking family members and posting brief bios on Find A Grave. Not only will this help cousins to understand the relationships, it will also provide hints to other researchers who are looking for members of these family trees. Admittedly, it's a bit of cousin bait that I hope will connect me to more cousins.
• "Tell the stories" and identify more ancestors so that future generations in my family and hubby's family will know the names and places they come from. Every St. Patrick's Day, hubby's family gets a card from me listing their Irish ancestral names. Every year, I remind them of their Mayflower roots--which were once known in the family, I'm sure, but forgotten over the generations. 
• In 2014-5, I created several brief "memory books" about my Schwartz, Burk, Wirtschafter, and Mahler families. Also, I created a photo book of my parents' wedding, so all descendants would know who's who in each photo and have the story of their courtship, which started with a matchmaker aunt from each side of the family. Next, I'm continuing to digitize family photos and organize them, along with names and dates or occasions, so these details will be available to future generations.
• I will memorialize great-aunt Etel Schwartz by adding her to Yad Vashem's list of Holocaust victims. I have her photo, I know a little about her, and I don't want her name and face to be forgotten. Ever. 

In the never-ending ancestor hunt, there are--as always--a number of specific genealogy mysteries I want to solve in 2016:

• For the umpteenth year, I'm looking for the origins of hubby's Steiner and Reinhart families. They came to Ohio in the early 1800s from Pennsylvania. Where was their ancestral home, Austria or Germany or Switzerland or another part of Europe?
• I'm still tracing the Roth family's connections to my Farkas family, and looking for the link to my Waldman and Weiss cousins. Getting closer!
• Still searching for the exact relationships in the Mitav and Birk families from Lithuania that led my grandpa Isaac and his siblings Abraham, Nellie, and Myer to  New York City. Getting closer!
• This year I'm focusing on hubby's Larimer/McKibbin connections because these will help me zero in on the part of Northern Ireland where they originated.
• Still looking for the ships that brought my Mahler great-grandparents (separately) to America in 1885-6.
• When and where did hubby's grandpa James Edgar Wood divorce his 2d wife Alice? And what happened to his 3d wife, Caroline?

Happy new year to all.