Framing the Childhood Jewelry of Mom and Her Twin

This elegant shadow box, in the works for two months, features the childhood jewelry of Mom (Daisy Schwartz Burk, 1919-1981) and her twin sister (Dorothy Helen Schwartz, 1919-2001). The creative design and meticulous archival framing were done by a truly terrific custom frame store in my area. 

All the jewelry items were gently cleaned and then carefully hand-stitched to the ecru linen background in a graceful arrangement. The 1920s photo, printed by Mpix, should look great for a century or longer behind high quality museum glass. The finishing touch: name/date plaques that identify Mom and Auntie and their birth/death years.

On the back is an archival envelope for storing a few photos, letters, and other documents related to these beloved ancestors, including a page of background about the jewelry items. Sis wants to include an old note with Mom's signature, too. Great idea!

Without question, this is an expensive archival solution to keeping special heirloom items safe and accessible. But off-the-shelf shadow boxes are widely available and less expensive if you want to try creating your own display of ancestral heirlooms.

For additional ideas about documenting and preserving ancestral items and other genealogical materials, please see my book, Planning a Future for Your Family's Past.

Appealing the VA's Skinny Extract of Dad's Claims File

A few weeks ago, the US Department of Veterans Affairs finally responded to my request for the claim records of Harold David Burk (1909-1978), my late father.  I faxed my official request to the VA on December 11 of last year. After waiting more than eight months, all I got was this pathetically skimpy, skinny extract (above) with nothing about Dad's military service, no spouse name, not even a birth or death date, only his parents' names. Grrrr.

Following the advice of Reclaim the Records, the nonprofit that aims to make public records actually public again, I am appealing. As next of kin, I am legally entitled to Dad's file.

I have to prove that I am, indeed, Dad's child, as part of the appeals process. But my official birth certificate, shown above (with judicious redactions), has NO NAME in the given name section, just under the words "Certificate of Birth."

Why? Because my parents were completely taken by surprise when not one but two babies were born. They weren't prepared with two names and needed a few days to decide. In the hospital, I was temporarily named "Burk A" and my sister's name was "Burk B".

Our names were filed with the Department of Health a couple of weeks later, then written on the back of our original birth certificates.

I have to explain all of that background in my appeal letter to VA officials. The birth cert clearly states that 2 children were born, and I'm the first. This should help.

In all, I included 7 attachments in my pdf file, including a copy of my appeal letter, emailed to the VA Office of General Counsel.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine that the harried VA officials will take much time to read the fine print in my appeal letter and documents. 😕 But I don't give up easily!

Watch for a post months from now on the outcome of my appeal. 

Uncommon Given Names? Um, Census Says...

I tried an experiment: On Ancestry, I searched ONLY the US Federal Census Collection for some of the more uncommon given names in my husband's family tree (at least, I consider those names to be uncommon). And each time, I learned that the Census period from 1790 to 1950 enumerated a lot of people with each of those seemingly uncommon given names.

Above, a screen shot from my search for Capitola, which was the given name of my husband's 1c1r on his maternal side. Including spelling variations, there are more than 19.6 million people named Capitola covered by the US Census.*

Here are some other names I searched and how many I found enumerated in the entire span of the US Census.

D'Alva - 10.4 million

Elfie - 34 million

Elroy - 32.6 million

Elveretta - 35.7 million

Floyda - 15.5 million

Lavatia - 25 million

Leander - 25.2 million

Ulysses - 490,000 (this was a surprise, given the popularity of the other names)

Compare these statistics with one of the most common given names in hubby's family tree: Jane, which appears 91 million times in the US Census over the years!

Have you tried this with some of the seemingly uncommon given names in your tree? 

*Randy Seaver notes, in a reader comment, that I didn't specify an exact match when searching for these given names. He's absolutely correct. The numbers would be far, far lower if I searched only for "Elveretta" without any spelling variations. I included variations (like "Elvereta") for two reasons. First, enumerators didn't always spell names the way those being enumerated would spell them. Second, indexing isn't always accurate. So I cast a wide net with multiple variations, for fun.

Discovering the Short Life of Augusta Sarah Markell

Julius Markell (1882-1966) was one of four Markell brothers, in-laws to my father's Mahler family. Depending on the source, Julius was born in Russia on September 1st of 1882 or in 1883. 

First family

Julius worked as a plasterer when in his 20s, which somehow brought him to the West Coast of the United States, where he married Ella Lebowitz (1884-1965). 

Ella and Julius had a daughter together in 1908, and the family soon moved to Boston and then to Pittsburgh, where Ella filed for divorce in 1915. The legal proceedings dragged on for years. Meanwhile Julius took off to Brooklyn, New York to work in doll manufacturing. His naturalization, dated April 1920 in Brooklyn, indicated his wife Ella and daughter Ruth were living in Pittsburgh.

Second family

By 1921, Julius was apparently divorced and he had moved on to yet another occupation (theater manager) in a new location (Pittsfield, Massachusetts). On May 31, 1921, the City Clerk of Pittsfield performed the wedding ceremony for Julius and his second wife, Tillie Sacks. By 1923, the couple had moved back to Brooklyn, where Julius was again working as a plasterer.

New news: Revisiting my research last week, I did an online search for both the husband and wife's names together. The fifth result from that search was a Find a Grave memorial that was created on May 29, 2025, so only newly visible. I used the info on that memorial to search FamilySearch for the baby girl's original birth and death records, which popped up immediately.

Sad to say, I learned that little Augusta Sarah Markell was born on March 28, 1922 in Pittsfield (as shown on the birth cert at top) and died just one month and seven days later, on May 5, 1922, due to accidental burns of her toes. Heartbreaking. I can't even imagine how the parents felt.

Happily, the couple's second child, William, was born in March of 1923 in Brooklyn, NY--just about a year from the day their first child was born in Pittsfield. I don't know whether anyone ever spoke of Augusta in later years, but she is now on my family trees to be remembered for the future. 

Charles Francis Elton Wood and the Jersey Bread Company

My husband's 1c1r, Charles Francis Elton Wood (1891-1951), had a varied working career. Born in Toledo, Ohio, a son of Marion Elton Wood and Minnie Caroline Miller, Charles worked as a salesman in a local drug store before forming a partnership with another man to run a grocery store. He was in his early 20s at the time. [Thanks to the annual Toledo, Ohio city directories, plus the US Census and other sources, I found out a lot about his working life!]

After he married Lillian Mary Cragg (1892-1973) in 1916, Charles briefly worked with his father, a carpenter. Then for some unknown reason, he reported to the Toledo, Ohio draft board in 1917 that he was a farmer 26 miles away in Deerfield, Michigan. Huh? 

By 1919, Charles and Lillian had a daughter and he was employed as a salesman for the Sherlock Baking Company in Toledo. Ditto in 1920 and he was still a salesman through most of the 1920s, as the family grew to three children. Then in 1929, the city directory showed him as an agent for an unrelated company. 

From 1930 on, Charles was off to work for the Jersey Bread Company, a well-known bakery firm in the Toledo area. In 1940, the Census indicated he had been promoted to foreman, a position he retained for the rest of his career. 

Sadly, Charles died at the age of 60 in 1951. He was accidentally hit by a truck in Salt Lake City while visiting friends, and passed away after a heart attack in the hospital, survived by his wife and three daughters.

The Jersey Baking Company took steps to change with the times, offering a wider variety of breads to appeal to a broader customer base, as the ad at top shows. It plugged along until early 1974, when its factory was sold at auction and the firm ended its long and mostly successful run in the Toledo area.

"Off to work" is the week #35 challenge for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks from Amy Johnson Crow.

Celebrating My 17th Blogiversary

On August 25, 2008, I wrote my first genealogy blog post. Seventeen years later, I've written over 1900 posts about researching family trees, preserving genealogy materials, understanding social and historical context, finding cousins and having them find me, and more.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have called this blog something like "Good, Bad, Ugly Genealogy" because my years of research have turned up such a wide range of ancestor backgrounds in my tree and my husband's tree. 

Good: loving/compassionate relatives and in-laws, indigent journey-takers who helped each other survive in a new country, civic and military leaders, hard-working entrepreneurs, ancestors who sought to give their children and grandchildren better education and more opportunity. Bad: a few bootleggers (considered "bad" at the time), a few thieves, some wild kids, some absent parents. Ugly: too many early deaths from causes now preventable, a few questionable criminal activities, family estrangements for reasons that in retrospect seem repairable, a couple of sad suicides, and more. 

With one key exception (because someone still alive might be hurt by something an ancestor did), all of what I've learned is posted on my public family trees and has been relayed to my relatives and those of my hubby. 

I don't want to hide the truth, nor do I want the truth to be lost to future generations. As family historian, I want to be told the truth and I want my relatives and future generations to trust that I will share the truth with them.

From my heart, many thanks to the dear cousins who have connected with me via my blog. It is such a joy to be in touch with the descendants of ancestors and share photos and stories.

Finally, a big tip of the hat to my wonderful readers. Please know how much I really appreciate you all! 

My genealogy research:

My maternal grandparents (both from Hungary, both died in New York City)

    Hermina "Minnie" Farkas (1886-1964) m. Theodore "Teddy" Schwartz (1887-1965)

My paternal grandparents (Mahler from Riga, Burk from Lithuania, both died in NYC)

    Henrietta "Yetta" Mahler (1881-1954) m. Isaac Burk (1881-1943)

Husband's maternal grandparents (both born and died in Ohio)

    Floyda Mabel Steiner (1878-1948) m. Brice Larimer McClure (1878-1970)

Husband's paternal grandparents (Slatter from London/England, Wood from Ohio, both died in Ohio)

    Mary Slatter (1869-1925) m. James Edgar Wood (1871-1939)

Book Review: Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources

 

The subtitle of this concise but meaty book is "The Briefcase Edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace." The title is catchy and the cover is a breath of fresh air for a serious book about an important topic.

Source citations are a vital element in the Genealogical Proof Standard, and Mills lays out a careful roadmap for understanding, evaluating, and documenting the sources used in genealogy research.

Table of contents

As the table of contents shows, this handy book crams a lot into just 139 pages. 

In particular, I recommend bookmarking these seven figures that each condense a lot of wisdom into a single page:

Fig 1: Guidelines for Analyzing Evidence (on p. 18, invaluable advice)

Fig 2: Guidelines for Documentation (on p. 36)

Fig 3: Two Functions of a Source Note (p. 39)

Fig 4: Placement of Note Numbers (p. 45) 

Fig 5: Abbreviation tips (p. 55, especially handy)

Fig 6: Stylistic Tips for Source Notes (p. 56)

Fig 7: Bibliographic Notes (p. 57)

The Universal Templates chapter on p. 83 is absolutely invaluable for finding a mix-and-match example of how to cite almost any type of source. Even the glossary (pp. 107-120) is a mini-master class in genealogical sources and citation. Ever wonder what "negative findings" really are? Or the meaning of "correlation" in the genealogy proof standard? The author's excellent glossary explains it all!

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see DNA or genetic genealogy mentioned in this book. So I recommend downloading the syllabus and watching the talk "DNA: Proof, Citation & Privacy" by Elizabeth Shown Mills on Legacy Family Tree Webinars. 

Please note: I received this book for free as a review copy but the opinions and comments here are entirely my own.