My Family Tree Word Cloud

 

Here are the main names on my family tree, including many of those who married into my maternal and paternal lines. Fun to see them in a tree shape! 

Thanks to the free online word cloud generator here, which includes a tree shape and the option to customize colors, sizes, and fonts, not just names. 

How a FAN Club Member Identified an Ancestor for Me

I've been scanning old photos and negatives left by my father-in-law, Edgar James Wood (1903-1986). 

At left, a 1919 image I blogged about just recently, remarking on the fashions.

This came from a set of negatives that Ed had marked as "Baker family, 1919."

I know the names of these two sisters, who were Ed's first cousins, but not which is which in the photo.

At right, a photo that my hubby and I believe shows Ed with these same two cousins, 50 years later. No caption, but a family story gave us confidence that these were the Baker sisters. Which is which? We had no idea. Until now.

Hearing from a FAN club descendant

This week, I received a message from a gentleman (Pat) who noticed the Baker names on my public family tree.

Pat is not related to the Bakers or to my husband. 

Here's where it gets a little convoluted. Pat is the executor of the estate for a lady who was the executor for the estate of one of the Baker sisters. In other words, he's the descendant of a FAN club member.

Connecting through my public family tree

When Pat's mom died, he inherited her boxes of stuff, including boxes from her  dear friend, Edith, who died a few years earlier. Pat's Mom wanted her friend's photos and letters to survive, so she bequeathed them to her son. (She wisely planned ahead before she joined her ancestors.)

Now Pat is sorting the bequest and looking for descendants who would like to have some of the items he inherited.

Pat noticed Edith and her sister on my Ancestry public family tree and sent me a message. I confirmed how Edith was related to my father-in-law and thus to my husband. 

Then we exchanged photos. He shared a photo of Edith in her later years. We are so grateful he did.

Eureka! Thanks to the FAN club, I now know exactly which of the ladies in both of these photos is Edith and which is her sister. Edith is on the right in the later photo, on the left in the younger photo. And Pat can see how lovely Edith was in her youth.

A good reason to have a public tree...even without photos, it serves as cousin bait and FAN club bait, with ancestor names/dates/locations visible and the option to send a message. 

Who We Are and How We're Related

List of Larimer ancestors written by Brice Larimer McClure

"I am Brice McClure, a son of Margaret Larimer McClure and Wm. McClure," begins the scrap of family history above. It was written by my husband's maternal grandfather (Brice Larimer McClure, 1878-1970) in the first half of the twentieth century.

The family treasures this scrap of paper in Brice's handwriting, listing what he was told about his Larimer family's history. It also demonstrates Brice's pride in his family's background and his hope that these ancestors would be remembered for generations to come.

Brice set a wonderful example: He told descendants (1) exactly who he was and (2) exactly how he was related to his ancestors.

I've been putting my name and the date on every family history booklet I write. Now I realize that's not enough information about me.

When I wrote my most recent booklet about my late father-in-law's musical life, I added a longer note to the title page:

"Written by Marian Burk Wood, daughter-in-law of Edgar James Wood, in December, 2019."

In a decade or two, when some descendant pulls this dusty booklet off the shelf, he or she will see both my name and my relationship to this ancestor.

Although I could add even more info to explain how I fit into the family, I want to keep things simple and leave the spotlight on the featured ancestor in my booklet.

Now future generations will at least know my name, my relationship to the ancestor I'm writing about, and when I prepared the booklet.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Surname Word-Cloud

Randy Seaver's challenge this week is to make a Surname Christmas Tree. A fun idea--one that I adapted for my own genealogical situation.

There are more than 80 surnames in my Jewish family tree. So I made a word-cloud in the shape of a heart rather than a tree.

Following Randy's how-to explanation, I first listed the names in a Word document and then sorted alphabetically, on the theory that a word-cloud generator would randomly assign names to different places in the shape.

Next, I selected one of the free word-cloud generation sites, chose the color theme, chose the shape (a heart, loosely interpreted as you can see), and set the gap between names at 2 spaces.

Then I uploaded my names, looked at the result, and played with a few of the settings (the font, for instance) until I liked the way the whole thing looked.

Finally, I downloaded the word-cloud as a .jpg and here it is!

Thanks, Randy, for this excellent holiday idea.

P.S.: I'm also listing all the surnames here as cousin bait:

ADELMAN

ASH

BARTH

BERGER

BERK

BERKMAN

BIRK

BLAUMAN

BLOCK

BOURSTEIN

BROWNSTEIN

BURK

BURKE

CAPLAN

CASSON

CHAZAN

DIAMOND

EMERMAN

ETSCHEL

EZRATI

FARBER

FARKAS

FESTINGER

GAFFIN

GARFIELD

GELBMAN

GENNIS

GOLDBERG

GOLDMAN

GOODFRIEND

GROSSMAN

GUTFRIED

HARRIS

HARTFIELD

HORWICH

JACOBS

KATZ

KLEIN

KOBLER

KRAUS

KUBA

KUNSTLER

LANG

LEBOWITZ

LETHERMAN

LEVINE

LEVY

LIPSON

LURIA

MAHLER

MANDEL

MANDEL

MARKELL

MARKS

MITAV

PITLER

POMPIONSKY

RETHY

RIGOROFSKY

ROSEN

ROTH

SALKOWITZ

SCHWARTZ

SEGAL

SHUHAM

SIMON

SIMONOWITZ

SMITH

SNYDERMAN

SOLOMON

STEINBERGER

STERN

VINOKUR

VOLK

WAJMAN

WALDMAN

WEIMAN

WEISS

WHITELAW

WIRTSCHAFTER

WOLF

ZUDECK 

-->

What's So Funny About Family History?

Index to my maternal Farkas Family Tree
meeting minutes, 1933-1964

This week's #52Ancestors challenge by Amy Johnson Crow is comedy. Reading through 500 pages of Farkas Family Tree meeting minutes (index shown above), I found a few tidbits that made me smile.

The Farkas Family Tree was founded by descendants of my maternal great-grandparents, Moritz Farkas (1857-1936) and Leni Kunstler Farkas (1865-1938). It was active from 1933 through 1964. By the time I was old enough to be inducted as a member, the organization was inactive. Some of the incidents I'm going to mention here occurred way before my time, others just within living memory ;0

For instance, the minutes noted that "the twins" (me and my sister) at age four, "went exploring in their pajamas one morning. At 6 am, they walked out of the apartment and were on their way when Mom found them in the hall." Good thing she found us, we lived in a big apartment building in the Bronx! Another report was how one of us decided to scour the kitchen floor with cinnamon. Hoo boy. Funny now, but not funny to Mom at the time!

Serious About Food 

Each and every meeting included some kind of food, serious eating really, but often described with humor. In February, 1934, the minutes reported on a "Pickled Herring Party" that began at 6 pm and continued well past 9 pm. Let me quote: "Boy, oh boy, how those poor herrings suffered, being torn from fin to fin, not to mention the scads of pickled onions also consumed."

Often the snack or meal included quote "stinkin' cheeses" unquote supplied by one of the dairy grocers, most likely the bachelor great uncles, Julius and Peter. I found these mentioned, along with gefilte fish, stuffed cabbage, corned beef, and other delicacies, in the minutes of the 1930s and the 1940s. At a 1945 meeting, the secretary says, "The way we made that most delicious roast beef disappear, one would think we were the descendants of Houdini." In short, the hosts and hostesses seemed to enjoy trying to outdo each other with feasts at monthly meetings.

Funny About Money

From the beginning, paying membership dues involved nagging in a nice way. At one meeting, a trustee said he had audited "last year's swindle sheets" and found $5 missing. What happened? A member said he had paid his dues but the treasurer claimed not have received the cash. To keep the peace, a motion was passed to drop the matter entirely.

Then there were decisions (sometimes loud discussions) about what the family tree would and would not pay for. Regardless of the amount, bills were reported in the minutes. Quoting from the June 1944 minutes: "Bills, now as unwelcome as ever, reared their ugly heads, to the tune of eight dollars."

More than once, when a new treasurer was elected, the minutes observed that the old treasurer happened [wink, wink] to have acquired a new car while being in charge of the tree's money. Since the treasury rarely had more than $100, it's safe to assume coincidence only, right?

Genealogical and Biography Committees--No Kidding

Left unfinished by the tree association were two projects which descendants like myself would dearly love to have, all kidding aside.

Only a few years after the organization began, a "Genealogical Committee" was formed to put the family tree down on paper. After a few months of reporting to the meetings that the committee was "making progress," the idea was dropped during the 1930s. The project was unsuccessfully revived for the tree association's 25th anniversary in 1958. Alas, no written tree was ever given to members or passed down in the family.

Just before WWII, a great uncle had the idea to form a "Biography Committee." He tried for more than a year to collect biographies written by the founding members of the tree. Once again, it was a good idea that never quite worked out, because few members participated. Oh, how I would have enjoyed reading these biographies from the past, a kind of genealogical "mug book" of Farkas ancestors.

Sentimental Sunday: Pages from the Story of Wood and Slatter

The Story of James Edgar Wood and Mary Slatter Wood is written, photos and maps are in place, and I'm going to bring the .pdf to be color-laser-printed in the local copy shop. In all, I needed 21 pages to tell the story of hubby's paternal grandparents James, Mary, their family backgrounds, along with a brief overview of what happened to their four sons (including my late father-in-law, who took these photos of the 1917 Ford).

Just in time for the June Genealogy Blog Party, here are two pages from this newest family memory booklet, and a few lessons learned along the way toward preserving this family history:

• Maps help readers follow along as ancestors migrate or take a trip (as in the page at top, a 1917 trip from Cleveland to Chicago).
• Photos personalize the story and bring readers face to face with faces and places from the family's past. I included lots of photos!
• Include quotes from ancestors to keep their voices alive for descendants who never met them. I had quotes from interviews, letters, a diary.
• Include a timeline to give descendants a better sense of what happened, where, and when. I constructed this last, after I pieced together the entire story.
• Include sources for that rare reader who asks: "How do we know that?" The actual booklet has a few document excerpts but full documents are sitting in my files.
• Caption all photos. I have 2 pages of captions at the end of the booklet, with lots of details, including a reminder of the relationships between people in the photo and the readers ("Mary Slatter's older sister" is an example, plus an explanation that Mary Slatter was my husband's paternal grandmother). 

Don't forget to include a family tree! I included one in the back of the booklet, showing this branch and how it extends back three generations on James's side and on Mary's side.

This is only one way I'm sharing my family's history with the next generation. More ideas are in my genealogy book, Planning a Future for Your Family's Past.

Tuesday's Tip: Gifting a DNA Test? Gift a Family Tree Chart Too!

My good friend suggested giving relatives a DNA test as a birthday gift. She did it for her children, their spouses, and the grandchildren. The recipients were fascinated. They even asked questions about ancestors! What a wonderful way to get the next generation interested in family history.

I took her suggestion and gifted a niece with a DNA test. To give her a headstart on figuring out which ancestors might have been responsible for which parts of her DNA, I also gave her a colorful family tree showing her mother's and father's lines, going back 3 generations. Sure, she can see our family tree on Ancestry. But for a quick peek, it's to easier to read the printed version.

When the results came in, she was excited about the surprises in her background--but the answers were too far back to be reflected on the family tree I printed for her. So my next recipient will get a DNA test, a family tree, and a pedigree chart (more than one, showing each side's pedigree as far back as I can document).

I downloaded the chart above for free from Misbach (there are more generations on the chart, too many to show here). By the way, I also keep pedigree charts in each of my main surname file folders so I can consult them without having to crank up my software or go online.

Here are a few sources for a number of free family tree charts, pedigree charts, and family group sheets.

• Misbach Enterprises (offers free downloadable .pdf charts and forms)
• Family Tree Magazine (offers free downloadable .pdf charts and forms)
• Ancestry (free downloadable .pdf charts and forms)
• Family Search (free downloadable .pdf charts and forms)

For a more complete list of sources, check Cyndi's List. Happy gifting!