Sepia Saturday and Saturday Night Genea-Fun

James Edgar Wood in his 1917 Ford, Summer of 1917

This week's Sepia Saturday ties in well with my response to Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge! So I combined the two.

Sepia Saturday: Posing with the Car

Above, a photo taken of my husband's grandfather, James Edgar Wood (1871-1939) by hubby's father, Edgar James Wood, (1903-1986). Ed was only 14 when he took this photo of his father during a road trip from their home in Cleveland, OH to downtown Chicago, visiting Wood family members along the way. Ed had gotten a camera for his birthday and began a lifelong hobby of chronicling family activities.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Top 20 Surnames in Family Tree

Using RootsMagic7, and following Randy's instructions, I went to Reports, then Lists, scrolled down to "Surname Statistics List," and selected "Frequency of Surnames" from the list.

With 3,128 people in my husband's Wood family tree, I could have printed 17 pages for the "Frequency of Surnames" report. Instead, I printed only the first two pages. After that, the frequency of surnames dropped off sharply.

And the winner is . . . WOOD, which appears a total of 204 times (125 males, 78 females). The oldest date of a Wood ancestor record is 1551, the most recent date is 2019.

The top 20 are: Wood, Larimer, McClure, Work, Steiner, Slatter, McKibbin, Hilborn, Denning, Smith, Cushman, Brown, Taber, Nelson, Johnson, Bradford, Short, Caldwell, Rinehart, and Miller. 

By the time I got to Miller, there were only 17 appearances in the Wood family tree (11 males, 6 females), with the oldest date of 1803 and the most recent date of 2006. A Miller married a Work (the granddaughter of a Work-Larimer marriage) and that's how the Miller surname connects to my husband's Wood family tree.

Genealogy by the States: New York state of mind

There are so many wonderful New York City sources to help with my genealogy research that I scarcely know where to begin. My Schwartz, Farkas, Birk, and Mahler ancestors all sailed past the Statue of Liberty from Eastern Europe, so my genealogy naturally has a New York state of mind.

Here are four of my favorite sites for NYC genealogy:

• NYC brides, grooms, births, deaths, and naturalizations: My top go-to site is the Italian Genealogical Group. It's free and the volunteers who transcribed the records and developed the databases have done an incredible job. 
• 1940 NYC directories, old photos, and much, much more: online and in person at the NY Public Library Milstein Division. Browsing the Digital Gallery brings me back to the New York City of my grandparents' time.
• Ellis Island and Castle Green sites are helpful in finding immigrants who landed in NYC, although I prefer Family Search's Ellis Island passenger lists and Ancestry, not to mention Fold3's naturalization documents.
• Linkpendium's city and borough-by-borough links that that of the Bronx are quite useful. Actually, Linkpendium is great for any state!

Now for my most recent New York genealogy adventures in following the Markell family. Barnhart (Barney, Bernard) H. Markell (1874-1944) was the father-in-law of my grand-aunt Mary Mahler Markell. As I wrote earlier this year, Barney came to New York from Boston with his son Joseph after the early death of his first wife, Rose Lebowitz. I've followed the paper trail of Barney and his progeny via US and NY census data, but have yet to discover exactly how Julius and Barney Markell are related.

On Friday, hubby and I took a field trip to Riverside Cemetery in NJ, where Barney is buried (above). In the same plot were: Barney's second wife, Esther M. Markell; Esther's daughter Ella Markell and her two husbands, Albert Brown (originally Brownstein) and Jeremiah Match; and Albert's brother-in-law David Zenkel. RIP.

This weekly prompt about New York is part of the "Genealogy by the States" series by Jim Sanders.