MyMemories Review and Giveaway

The good people at MyMemories recently provided me with two free copies of the MyMemories Digital Scrapbooking Suite - one to review, and one to give away. I had read plenty of rave reviews of MyMemories before, but I've never been much of a scrapbooker. (At least, I thought I'd never been much of a scrapbooker. A few months ago, while looking for some old Art History notes to lend my sister, I found 3 separate scrapbooks dating to 2004. It appears that around the time I graduated high school, I was actually quite the scrapbooker.)

This offer came at the perfect time, though, when I'd begun thinking about creating a more personalized blog header, and wanted to create a banner for my Zazzle store, Wear You Came From. (That one is still in the works.)

I started out trying to create a banner from scratch, using my own creativity. My own creativity wasn't up to the task, and I found the the album templates provided by MyMemories were better for a beginner. The result, which you can see above, was exactly what I was looking for.

This weekend, in honor of the 5th Anniversary of my first date with Ben, I decided to open up MyMemories again and scrapbook some of the pictures from a trip we took to St. Lucia last year for our first wedding anniversary. This time, not being such a rank beginner, I decided to get a little more creative. I used one of the templates available, but removed the embellishments that didn't fit the mood of our trip, and added my own photos from St. Lucia as custom background papers.

Quite frankly, my favorite aspects of these pages are the backgrounds, because St. Lucia itself looked a lot better than Ben and I did. In several of these pages, we have just finished doing things like climbing large hills, and we look it. But even when we were sweaty and haggard and had flyaway hair, the beaches, jungles, oceans, flowers, and pineapples of St. Lucia were gorgeous. (Seriously, did you know how pineapples grow? That one you see there was growing right in front of our cabin, out of a bush right on the ground!)

One of my favorite things about MyMemories is the versatility. You can pop your photos directly into the spots provided and call it a day, or you can move things around and personalize the pages with additional embellishments, photographs, and text. You can showcase historic family photos of your ancestors, or you can create visually interesting layouts for the pictures you took with your iPhone or digital camera last year, or last week.

Now, here comes the part you're interested in, the part where you get a chance to win a copy of the software yourself!

How do you enter to win? It's easy!

First, visit mymemories.com and take a look around. Choose the album template you like most, or would be most likely to use. (I see a family-tree themed template, and they have a whole category called "heritage," which I'm sure would interest my readers!) Then, come back here and leave a comment on this post, telling me which one it is. Make sure to include your e-mail address in the comment if you'd like to be eligible to win.

A winner will be chosen at random from those who comment in the comments section of this post. E-mails do not count. The contest will be open for 1 week. No entries will be accepted after 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, March 5, 2013.


[Disclosure: I received a free copy of the MyMemories Digital Scrapbooking software to review from MyMemories.com. MyMemories.com is also providing a free copy to give away.]

The importance of heirlooms

A few months ago, my sister asked me to bring an old piece of furniture back to my parents' house when she was rearranging her apartment. It was a small end table that had belonged to our 2x great-aunt, Mary Rose Mulvaney Daniels, or Auntie Mae.


Although Auntie Mae died before either of us was born, she looms large in our family's collective consciousness. She had no children, and her husband died young, so she spent a lot of time with her nieces and nephews and their families, and stories about her are told frequently to this day.


Auntie Mae would end each dinner with "Thank God and the O'Haras for another good meal."

Auntie Mae would compliment you on what you were wearing when it was something you'd received from her as a gift.

Auntie Mae would drink Presbyterians, and remark on my grandfather's bar tending skills: "You make a strong drink, Bill O'Hara."

Auntie Mae would send my dad $5 in a card when he was in college, with an admonition not to spend it on beer. (It was always spent on beer.)

Auntie Mae and her good friend, Sally, would go for a "constitutional" around the block in the evening. As they got older, the ritual moved into the backyard, and consisted of a stroll around the pool - but it was still their constitutional.


As Laura loaded Auntie Mae's end table into my car, she asked me to put it in the attic at my parents' house - "unless you want use it?" 15 seconds of considering the limited space in my apartment and the table's small size and concealed storage capability, and I was in. It was only later that I realized how fitting it was: Auntie Mae had lived for years in the small Queens neighborhood where I've lived for 18 months. After a detour through our childhood home in the suburbs and my sister's Brooklyn apartment, the end table would be going home.

          

I'm sure Auntie Mae never kept a PlayStation3 on top of this little end table, or had it filled with bad movies and TV on DVD. Still, there was a certain sense of continuity, of relationship, of her being a real person and a part of our lives, when my husband asked me yesterday - he was preparing for a boys' night of watching said bad movies -  "What happened to our copy of The Room?" and I responded "I think it's in Auntie's Mae's end table." It was as natural as if I'd said "I think it's in the bag your mom gave us" or "Check under my sister's books." And it was equally as natural that he responded a few minutes later, "You were right. It was in Auntie Mae's table."

Ben has a hard time keeping my ancestors straight (meanwhile, I know some of his very well), but a tangible object - a whole piece of furniture - the thing that holds our DVDs - sitting right in our living room is hard to ignore, and hard to forget. Ben had never heard of Auntie Mae before 5 years ago. I had always known about her, but never known her. But being privileged to have this heirloom in our home allows us to keep her memory alive, in some small way, in even the most mundane parts of our daily lives.

Stuff My Great-Grandparents Said

I recently mentioned having found my paternal grandfather's responses to one of those "Story of My Life" books full of writing prompts. Pop had answered the first prompt, and then proceeded to ignore the next ones in favor of making a list of "Quotes from my Parents, " which I'll share here, verbatim.

The phrases within the quotation marks are my great-grandparents' actual quotes, with context provided in my grandfather's hand.

MOM: Growing up in the city + off from school in the summer, we had to be back in the apartment after the sun went down because:
"There is no good on the streets after dark."

DAD: When I didn't think I could handle going to Regis High School (a scholarship school):
"If the other kids can do it, you can do it."

DAD: "Don't take yourself too seriously . . . if you do, no one else will take you seriously at all."

"Laugh every chance you get, there will always be occasions to cry."

MOM: "Get as much education as you can. No matter what happens in life . . . that is the one thing no one can take away from you."

MOM: On raising babies:
"Get them before they are two, or they will get you."

As I type these out, I find that they're a lot more revealing than I realized on first reading them, and I hope to do some more in depth posts unpacking some of them in the future. 

Erector Set

I recently came across a few photocopied pages from one of those "The Story of My Life" books, filled out in my grandfather's hand. My aunt had given it to him when he was alive, and he proceeded to fill out only the first three pages. Although he started by answering the prompts, it soon became a list of "Quotes from My Parents," which I'll cover in a different post.

The first prompt, the only one he actually responded to, asked "What did you enjoy doing most as a child? Did you prefer doing it alone or with someone else?" Pop responded

Playing stick ball, having a catch with Dad in Prospect Park, going to Ebetts [sic] Field for the first time with Dad.

I enjoyed my Erector Set. You could build all sorts of things.

The first part was par for the course.  If you'd asked me what Pop had liked doing as a kid, my answer would have been all baseball, all the time. I'm sure I knew that that was an impossibly limited view of my grandfather's childhood, but what I knew of his younger years consisted almost entirely of stick ball, rooting for Dodgers, and playing ball in Prospect Park.

The bit about the Erector Set, though, stunned me. I don't know why it should seem so completely unexpected - Erector Sets were popular, obviously, and Pop couldn't have spent all  his free time playing baseball, but it was a part of my grandfather's childhood that stood out enough to be the only non-baseball activity that he listed and at the same time a part that I had never heard about before.

I didn't know the first thing about Erector Sets, other than that they failed to save the day in the movie The Sandlot, so I did a quick internet search and landed on the website of the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop, which has a page about the Erector Set. The Eli Whitney Museum has a collection related to A.C. Gilbert, one of the foremost toymakers of the 20th Century, whose products included the Erector Set.

1938 Advertisement for the No. 7 1/2 Erector

Image courtesy of the Eli Whitney Museum, www.eliwhitney.org

To be honest, part of what surprised me about reading that Pop liked playing with an Erector Set was that my entire knowledge of the toy came from those scenes in The Sandlot, and as a result, I associated it with the 1960s, and didn't realize that it had been around since my grandfather's boyhood in the 1930s. As it turns out, according to the Eli Whitney Museum, the Erector Set was invented in 1913, and was essentially already a classic when Pop was a kid. I found the image above on the website of the Eli Whitney Museum, and it reads, in part, "[Gilbert's] new 1938 Erectors have been completely redesigned and modernized." Pop was about 8 years old in 1938, so this seems to be pretty close to what he would have been playing with himself, in their apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The last line of the ad, pictured above, reads "The No. 7 1/2 Erector shown here is $10.00. Other sets are from $1.00 to $27.50." We can put that in the context of information gleaned from the 1940 US Census, which says that my great-grandfather, John J. O'Hara, made $2,180.00 in 1939, and paid $25/month in rent. This is a crude measurement to be sure, and rendered inaccurate by the vast changes in relative valuations over the past 70-odd years, but I can't fathom buying a child a toy that cost, at the upper end of the range cited, more than the monthly rent in an NYC apartment! (It should be noted that most people in their building were paying between $30 and $45; it seems that my great-grandfather was getting a deal on rent because his father was the landlord. But still!) I can only assume that Pop's Erector Set was not the extravagant $27.50 kit that was worth more than a month's rent for his parents.

Book Review: Brooklyn! An Illustrated History

When I was at The Genealogy Event last year, I attended a session by Laura G. Prescott on Timelines: Putting Your History into Historical Perspective, and it made me realize that I need to do more background research on my family's history. Luckily, after they immigrated, every line of my family (except 1) settled in Brooklyn, New York, and stayed there. While there's plenty of research still to do in various areas of Ireland, two towns in southern Italy, and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, I've been focusing my reading on Brooklyn, because it kills so many birds with one stone.

I started with Diocese of Immigrants: The Brooklyn Catholic Experience 1853-2003, which was a very interesting read, but I found it too heavy on the modern-day experience to be particularly useful in my research. Once I'd gotten through the first couple chapters, on the founding of the diocese, etc., I felt like I had to keep reading, in case anything good was in there, but wasn't finding it relevant to my work.

The next book I read was Brooklyn! An Illustrated History by Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, and it was fantastic. This book covers so many aspects of Brooklyn's rich and varied history, from its relationship to New York City, to the rise and fall of industry, to entertainment and recreation (Coney Island, anyone?) to a whole chapter on the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The book starts near the beginning*, with the original 5 Dutch towns that made up what is now the Borough of Brooklyn, and includes everything up to the more modern trends that were emerging when it was published in 1996. With nary a mention of hipsters, it's clear that this is not a book about Brooklyn that was published within the last decade! However, I know plenty about hipsters from my own friends, relatives, and personal observations - I don't need a book to tell me about skinny jeans, yoga, and mustaches. Brooklyn! An Illustrated History covers all the other important aspects of the borough. I found it particularly useful that it focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as those were the years of my family's primary residence in the area. (My earliest immigrant ancestors arrived circa 1851, and stayed until the mid-1950s.)

Of all the topics that the book touches upon, a few that interested me the most, in terms of situating the facts of my ancestors' lives in historical context, included the New York City draft riots in 1863; the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883; the expansion of the subway system through the early 20th century, the industry centered around the docks in Red Hook through the 19th and much of the 20th centuries; the development and popularity of Coney Island; and the rise and fall of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I particularly appreciated that the chapter on industry gave so much insight into Red Hook and South Brooklyn, where the docks were located, and also where my ancestors were located.

It would probably be an overstatement to say that this book is a tearjerker, but I'm beginning to worry that I've gotten a bit too invested in the lives - and geography - of my ancestors, because it made me cry. Twice.

• I couldn't quite hold back a few tears - on the subway, no less - when I read about the Dodgers' move to LA. This one hit particularly close to home, as I could imagine my Brooklyn-born, baseball-loving grandfather's dismay at the loss, made all the more vivid by the book's archival images of protesting fans.  

• After reading about the vibrant industrial center that Brooklyn once was, and the long and defunct history of brewing beer there, and knowing that my great-great-grandfather Michael Mulcahy was probably serving locally brewed beer at his pub in South Brooklyn, reading that "In a former matzoh factory on North Eleventh Street, the Brooklyn Brewery . . . revives Brooklyn's brewing tradition" made me cry. On the subway, once again. Now, this was not news to me. I've walked past Brooklyn Brewery dozens of times. I've drunk plenty of their beer. And I happen to be well aware that in the decade and a half since this book was published, Brooklyn Brewery has been joined by a number of other brewers making beer in the borough. But apparently I'm a big crybaby anyway.

While I can't guarantee that you'll be as moved as I was - probably a good thing, considering that this is not actually a book that's aiming to play on readers' emotions - I can unreservedly say that Brooklyn! An Illustrated History is a must-read for anyone looking for a good overview of the important parts of Brooklyn's history and development. It also has a very thorough bibliography at the end, offering lots of further avenues for research for those who are looking for a more in-depth examination of any particular topic.

*The earlier Indian inhabitants are treated with an unfortunately cursory description.


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.

Update: Graduation Day

Over a year ago, I published a post titled (Almost) Wordless Wednesday: Graduation Day, which featured a graduation day photograph of my grandfather, William J. O'Hara, and my musings about which graduation day it had been. Family opinion was divided as to whether he looked like he could be 13 (grade school graduation, from St. Savior's School), 18 (high school graduation, from Regis High School), 22 (college graduation, from Fordham University), or 26 (grad school graduation, from NYU). Obviously, that's a really big range, and the middle range, Regis or Fordham, seemed to be the most likely candidates.

Take a look at the fellow in the cap and gown and let me know how old you think he is. (Answer below.)

William J. O'Hara (L) and Henry Gorra

A few weeks ago, as I was preparing to publish a small booklet about my grandfather through Lulu, I found myself at my parents' house, browsing his old yearbooks. I hadn't meant to take them out - the thought of using his school pictures as illustrations hadn't occurred to me - but I went into the bookcase looking for something else, and walked away with yearbooks in hand instead.

I went through the Regis yearbook first, and this picture wasn't even in the back of my mind - until I saw what appeared to be a graduation day photograph, rows of boys seated upon a stage, all wearing jackets and ties, but not in caps and gowns. If I was right about that being graduation, then Regis would be ruled out, because the students didn't graduate in caps and gowns. The caption, which I don't recall exactly at the moment, was just explicit enough to make it clear that this was the graduating class (Class of 1948), but not quite specific enough to state whether or not they were actually graduating that day.

Next, I started going through the Fordham yearbook, now with this graduation picture very much on my mind. I got pretty far into the book without coming across anything that looked like a graduation picture, but then I saw something better. There was a shot of some other people standing outside of a building that looked like it very well might be the building behind my grandfather in our mystery picture, and it was identified as Reidy Hall. I went right to Google, and searched on the name of the building, which led me to Fordham University Library's digital collection, where a few further searches, and a few new images, left me with no doubt that Pop had been on the Fordham University campus when he was photographed, in his cap and gown, with his childhood friend Henry Gorra.

Blessing of Reidy Hall. Father at entrance, blessing plaque
October 10, 1947
With permission of Fordham University Archives and Special Collections

It's clear that this building has the same siding, same doors, same plaque.

Reidy Hall, according to the Fordham University website, was "a war barracks structure . . . named Reidy Hall in memory of Daniel Reidy, Class of 1935, who died in the assault on the Anzio beachhead in southern Italy."* I had tried to decipher what I could see of the plaque in the original picture of my grandfather, but it didn't tell me much. In this new picture, from Fordham, you can see that the entire plaque reads

Sgt DANIEL C. REIDY
GRADUATED
FROM SCHOOL of BUSINESS '35
KILLED IN ACTION IN ITALY, MAY 6 1944

Had I been able to read the entire plaque in the original photograph, of course, it would have shortened my search significantly.


So how old was he? If Pop was graduating from Fordham, then the photograph dates to June 1952, making him 21.5 years old. I'm eating a bit a crow, since I was on the side of "he looks too young to be graduating from college!" when we initially tried to figure out how to date the photograph last year.
 

*Howe, Bob, ed. "The College of Business Administration: 90 Years of History." Inside Fordham Online. N.p., 04 Oct 2010. Web. 4 Jan 2013. .

Accentuate the Positives Geneameme - 2012 in Review

I didn't have time to do a year in review/resolutions post as 2012 waned and 2013 dawned, so I'm going to take advantage of Geniaus's most recent Geneameme and Accentuate the Positive:

Remember to accentuate the positive - please delete the statements that are not relevant to your situation.

1.  [Some] elusive ancestor[s] I found [were] the Italians (I found a bunch, but they weren't particularly elusive, just on a line I hadn't explored before.)

2.  A precious family photo I found was not a photo of my family at all. I found a photo of other people that identified the location of this photo of my grandfather, and thus what school he was graduating from. I'm planning a post on it, so I won't say more now.

4.  An important vital record I found was Julia Mulvaney's death certificate. I didn't think it would be important, but boy was it!

6.  A geneasurprise I received was finding out that my great-grandmother, known to all as Molly throughout her life, was actually named Anna.

8.   My 2012 blog post that received a large number of hits or comments was On serendipity, and obstinately ignoring conflicting evidence - the above-mentioned post about my Grandma Molly. My actual post with the most hits was this one, for the 118th Carnival of Genealogy, but the CoG probably led to inflated numbers, so I won't count that.

10. A social media tool I enjoyed using for genealogy was Google+, not for research, but for connecting with and interacting with other genealogists.

11. A genealogy conference/seminar/webinar from which I learnt something new was The Genealogy Event.

15. A genealogy book that taught me something new was Brooklyn! An Illustrated History by Ellen Snyder-Grenier. (I'm reading it now, but I started it in 2012. That counts, right?) I recommend it highly for anyone with roots in Brooklyn at any point during its history.

16. A great repository/archive/library I visited was the Brooklyn Historical Society. I seriously need to get back there!

17. A new genealogy/history book I enjoyed was Hey America! Your Roots are Showing! by Megan Smolenyak, which I read on vacation soon after it came out. Very entertaining, but also a bit excruciating to read on the beach with no internet access, because it had me itching to renew my research exactly when I had no opportunity to do so!

19. A geneadventure I enjoyed was appearing on an episode of the Irish television show The Gathering, when my husband and I were interviewed about his ancestors, whose decades of correspondence can be found on our other blog, The Gleasure Letters.

20. Another positive I would like to share is that while posts on this blog have slowed to a trickle, that's mainly because I've been making a real effort for them each to be interesting, content-rich pieces, so I've been able to use my blogging to really help me organize my thoughts and my research and make connections I otherwise wouldn't have - and it's been pretty successful so far!

The genealogy of Christ: he is conceived and born of a Virgin

In honor of tomorrow's feast, I reproduce again the beginning of the first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew.

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac. And Isaac begot Jacob. And Jacob begot Judas and his brethren. And Judas begot Phares and Zara of Thamar. And Phares begot Esron. And Esron begot Aram. And Aram begot Aminadab. And Aminadab begot Naasson. And Naasson begot Salmon. And Salmon begot Booz of Rahab. And Booz begot Obed of Ruth. And Obed begot Jesse.

And Jesse begot David the king. And David the king begot Solomon, of her that had been the wife of Urias. And Solomon begot Roboam. And Roboam begot Abia. And Abia begot Asa. And Asa begot Josaphat. And Josaphat begot Joram. And Joram begot Ozias. And Ozias begot Joatham. And Joatham begot Achaz. And Achaz begot Ezechias. And Ezechias begot Manasses. And Manasses begot Amon. And Amon begot Josias.

And Josias begot Jechonias and his brethren in the transmigration of Babylon. And after the transmigration of Babylon, Jechonias begot Salathiel. And Salathiel begot Zorobabel. And Zorobabel begot Abiud. And Abiud begot Eliacim. And Eliacim begot Azor. And Azor begot Sadoc. And Sadoc begot Achim. And Achim begot Eliud. And Eliud begot Eleazar. And Eleazar begot Mathan. And Mathan begot Jacob.

And Jacob begot Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. So all the generations, from Abraham to David, are fourteen generations. And from David to the transmigration of Babylon, are fourteen generations: and from the transmigration of Babylon to Christ are fourteen generations.

Matthew 1:1-17

Douay-Rheims Bible

Merry Christmas!

Grandma Gatto's SS-5: Another piece of the puzzle

The family stories that my grandfather told always presented one view of his mother's immigration story. The paper trail says something a bit different. Hoping for a real answer, I ordered her Social Security Application.

My great-grandmother was Maria Stella D'Ingeo Gatto. Grandpa's version of the story says she was born in Italy, and after her mother died (in childbirth with her youngest sister), her father decided to move the family to America. On the way over, the immigration quota was fulfilled, and the ship was turned away. It went to Rio de Janiero, Brazil, and the family disembarked there. They stayed there for a number of years, during which time one of Maria's brothers was killed, run over by a wagon. They eventually continued their journey to America, and arrived in New York.

As I started researching this family line, though, I found documents that seemed to contradict this. The family's immigration papers showed them arriving in New York in 1917, which is prior to the imposition of the first European immigration quotas that I'm aware of, in 1924. They were also traveling directly from Italy - not from Brazil at all. Everyone in the family is listed as being Italian-born, though I can't for the life of me read the name of the town where they were born. (It should be Toritto. They're supposed to be from Toritto. But I don't think it says Toritto.)

Do you think this says Toritto?

And then I started finding American census records listing my great-grandmother and at least one of her sisters as having been born in Brazil.

1930 Census, giving South America as the birthplace for Maria D'Ingeo Gatto, as well as her parents

1940 Census giving Brazil as the birthplace for Maria D'Ingeo Gatto

1930 Census giving Brazil as the birthplace for Giovanna D'Ingeo DeGaetano, and Italy as the birthplace of her parents

Given their frequently misspelled Italian last names and their habit of taking on Americanized versions of their Italian birth names, these are the only census records I can find of the D'Ingeos as adults. Frustratingly, the 1940 Census for the Gatto family does not indicate who provided the information (this is omitted for all families on the page), so I don't know how reliable it is.

I ordered Grandma Gatto's (Maria D'Ingeo's) SS-5 a few months ago, in hopes of an answer to this question. Once more, the paper trail supports the born-in-Brazil hypothesis.

Maria D'Ingeo Gatto, SS-5

In this incompletely dated document (the last digit of the year is left off, leaving us to wonder "Nineteen fifty what?"), the information provided by my great-grandmother says that she was born on 27 September 1902 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sout Americia [sic]. She spells her maiden name and her mother's maiden name differently than I've ever seen them before, with D'Ingeo spelled as Di Gugeo and Page as Paich. (If it's true that her mother died when she was a young girl, of course, her mother's maiden name might have had little relevance in her life, and she may never have needed to know how to spell it "right.")

Evidence is mounting that my great-grandmother was born in Brazil, but I don't know the first thing about Brazilian geography, history, or research. I keep hoping for the Brazilian collections on FamilySearch to be indexed, but most aren't so far, and the "Brazilian Catholic Church Records" set requires you to know the parish or be sentenced to search through every Catholic baptism in the city - in Portugese. Looks like I need to do some serious learning.

Genealogy Gift Guide 2012

My mom asked me a couple weeks ago what I wanted for Christmas. I know she wasn't expecting me to ask for a DNA test, considering that she thought I was crazy when I asked for one for my birthday . . . and considering that I got one for my birthday. How many DNA tests does a girl need, anyway? (One (Y-DNA) for each male line that survives, plus one (autosomal) for herself, of course.)

Other people in our families tend to think that genealogy is boring, and can't imagine how delighted we'd be to unwrap a copy of Evidence Explained on Christmas morning, or to find A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland in our stockings. And so I'm pretty sure that my loved ones are loathe to get me what I really want, thinking that it's all just too boring for words.

At the same time, I think that the gifts I plan on giving this year do a nice job of incorporating family history in accessible ways that the non-genealogists in my life will appreciate and not be bored by. So this gift guide will incorporate both gifts for the genealogist in your life, and gifts genealogists can give to the "normal" people in their lives. They're things I'm planning on making, or buying for others, things I'd love to have, things I own and love, and things I think are cool. They're not all strictly genealogical, but they all are useful for research, or help incorporate our family histories into our celebrations and our lives.

Scanners
Wand Scanner - I've had the Pandigital Handheld Wand Scanner for several months now, and I never cease to be amazed by its convenience. It's easy to use, small enough to fit in my purse so I can carry it to relative's homes just in case some old photo albums come out, and I find the quality of the output is great. (I forgot when I went home this weekend, and I really regretted it! A wand scanner - don't leave home without it!)

Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner - I've heard fantastic things about the Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner, but I don't have one. Between my flatbed scanner and my wand scanner, I feel that my current scanning needs are pretty well covered. So many genealogists find it invaluable, though, that I suspect you can't go wrong getting this for the genealogist in your life. (Especially if she doesn't have a wand scanner. Every genealogist needs some kind of portable scanning technology.) (Note: I am not a Flip-Pal Affiliate. If you're interested in buying a Flip-Pal Scanner, I encourage you to go through the link of an affiliate, so that another member of the genealogy community can benefit from your purchase.)

Books
The beauty of books is that they can be customized to the research interests and existing library of the reader or they can be customized to the interest and family history of the non-genealogist in the family. You have choices. You could get Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills, or Hey, America, Your Roots are Showing by Megan Smolenyak, for almost any genealogist. (You could get the latter for almost anyone, period.) You could tailor your choices to the area of interest of the recipient, getting A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland, Second Edition by Brian Mitchell, for example, for someone researching in Ireland (I've been drooling over this one since I was introduced to it at The Genealogy Event). You could, of course, choose a relevant history book that's not genealogy-specific, but that lends context to the work of the researcher. (Doing most of my research in Brooklyn, I've recently checked out of the library Diocese of Immigrants: The Brooklyn Catholic Experience 1853-2003 and Brooklyn: An Illustrated History.)

You can also look for general interest books (even fiction!) that relate to the areas of interest of the researcher, or to the history of your family. These are a great choice for the non-genealogist in the family, too. Think on family history, family stories, even legends - you might help prove or disprove that old tale! If, for example, the high point in your grandfather's life was the time he pitched to Willie Mays during batting practice when they were in the Army together (my grandfather was that lucky man!), your father might be interested in a copy of the most recent Mays biography, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend. There's guaranteed to be a great book out there about almost any historical person, place, era, or event that intersected your family's experiences. 


DNA Tests
If you're interested in Genetic Genealogy, it's often worthwhile to take (or have your relatives take) more DNA tests than your average Joe Genealogy can afford all at once. If you're inclined to get a genealogist a relatively big-ticket item, discussing their interest in DNA testing might be a great way to go. FamilyTreeDNA is having their annual sale, so now's the time to buy! (But always find out what company your favorite genealogist prefers to test with first.) I could get one of these every Christmas for the next 5 years, and it wouldn't be too many.

Photo Gifts
Any gift that includes photos, past or present, is, in essence, a family history gift. These are great gifts that can be appreciated by both genealogists and those not genealogically inclined relatives whose interests you're trying to spark. Any variety of picture frame might work, depending on your idea for a project, but a few ideas are Christmas ornament frames like these, or a set of photo coasters like these, which I think would look great filled with old black and white or sepia-toned pictures. Be sure to use copies of old photos, never originals! (I wish I had some great pictures to share, but while these are both ideas I've had for years, they're not ideas I've put into practice yet. I'm looking at a photo collage on the wall of my mother's house right now, that I made her as a Mothers' Day gift a number of years ago, but I won't be sharing it on the blog, because it includes both pictures of relatives who prefer not to appear on the internet, and pictures of me in the throes of an adolescence that I'd rather didn't appear in the living room, much less on the internet. Nonetheless, I can attest that it was well-received.)

Education
Genealogists love education. They love conferences, they love reading, they love lectures, they love webinars, they love round tables and working groups and societies. But genealogy as a hobby isn't cheap, and the pursuit of genealogical excellence is even less so, so most of us have to be choosy about what we join and attend. Consider getting your favorite genealogists membership in a local genealogical society, or one in the area in which they research, or else in one of the major national societies, like NEHGS, NYG&B, SCGS, or NGS. Consider buying tickets to a local conference, or offer to sign them up for an interesting webinar. (Just remember how we started this discussion with a distinction between what genealogists find interesting and what so-called normal people find interesting.) Try a subscription to a print magazine, like Family Tree Magazine, or an online resource, like the Plus Edition of Dick Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter.

Research
If there's one thing that genealogists love more than they love education, it's research. I've always thought that records repositories should offer gift certificates (imagine finding in your stocking vouchers for 2 BMDs, a probate record, and a declaration of intent!), but despite my prodding, it never caught on. Still, there are other ways you can give someone the gift of research. A subscription to Ancestry.com, GenealogyBank, or Fold3 is an obvious way, but you could also do things that are a little less tangible, but could be more helpful. Offer to watch the kids for a day so he or she can have some uninterrupted hours at the local Family History Center. Heck, if you're up for it, offer to accompany her to the FHC, to help read microfilm. (Don't worry, she'll tell you're looking for. She may be scanning a large series of marriage records for every instance of the name Quinn in hopes of finding her great-great-grandparents, Hugh and Mary. A second set of eyes might mean the difference between spending a few weeks on a record set and spending many weeks on it!)

Organization
Genealogist might not enjoy organization quite as much as they enjoy research and education, but they know that it's just as important, if not more so. There are a couple of different organizational methods that genealogists use, and any of them could be the basis for a good gift.

There's genealogy software, like RootsMagic, Reunion, or Family Tree Maker. I can recommend FTM for Mac (version 2), which is what I use and which is the version I linked to, but your preference may differ, based on your needs and your operating system.

And then there are the old-fashioned, low-tech organizational tools that are essential for every genealogist, including the ones who use software and online programs. File folders, file cabinets, binders, page protectors, etc. These, I will grant you, are not particularly exciting, but they're useful. (I'm down to 1 remaining file folder at my house, and definitely in the market for more!) Check out Gaylord or University Products for archival and preservation-quality folders and boxes.

Genealogy Gear
I'm going to throw in a plug for my own small genealogy shop on Zazzle.com, Wear You Came From. Check it out for everything from "#1 Ancestor" shirts for genie grandparents to bowls proclaiming "My family tree has bark!" for the furriest members of the family. There are undoubtedly also other great genealogy-inspired shops on Zazzle.com, as well as on CafePress, that you can look to for other designs, if nothing at my shop strikes your fancy. (But check out Wear You Came From first!)

Family Tree
Last year, I bought a set of beautiful family tree charts from the Etsy shop Fresh Retro Gallery. I used one to make a family tree of my maternal side of the family, which I gave to my grandparents, and my husband is now working on the other, which will be given to his parents as a Christmas present this year. (I have complete confidence that they, like most of my blood relatives, never so much as glance at this blog, so I don't mind saying so publicly.) My in-laws haven't gotten their gift yet, but my grandmother loved hers, and it's now hung prominently in their home. Most people are glad to hang a beautiful, "completed," family tree in their homes, even if they wouldn't be nearly as interested in the research that went into it.

Scrapbooking
Not all genealogists are crafty, or fans of scrapbooking. For a long time I thought that I wasn't. (Two weeks ago, at my parents' house, I stumbled across not 1, not 2, but 3 forgotten scrapbooks that I had made when I was in high school and college. Apparently, I was actually quite the scrapbooker at one point!) If you're a genealogist with that scrapbooking gene, a well-done scrapbook about a family, person, or event in your family's history makes a beautiful gift for a relative. If you're interested in digital scrapbooking, try the MyMemories Suite. It's the tool I used to create the header for this blog recently, and it can make wonderful scrapbooks, as well. If you plan to buy MyMemories software, you can use the exclusive coupon code STMMMS25444 to get a discount on your purchase. Watch this space for a full review and a giveaway in the coming weeks!

Family Stories

The gift that I'm most looking forward to giving this is year is a compilation of family stories that I wrote up and had published, using Lulu.com. Before my grandfather passed away, he used to come over for dinner frequently, and often regaled us with stories of different eras and events of his life. One night, my mom remarked, "Someone should be writing these down!" and I resolved to do so, though I didn't tell anyone about it. At the time, I was in high school, and later college, and it was before I was officially interested in genealogy - but I was, thank goodness, interested enough to write down notes after Pop left each evening. (I wasn't perfect - my most frustrating oversight is a note that says "meeting Nan," to remind myself to write down the story he'd told about meeting my grandmother, which I never got around to. I've forgotten the story, as has apparently everyone else who heard it that night, and the story of how they met seems to have been lost to history, though I'm on a mission to ask everyone who might know.) The book - about 20 pages, with illustrations using scanned family photos - is a gift for my dad, but I've also ordered a copy for each of my aunts, and will make it available via Lulu.com to any other relatives who want a copy, in service of a strategy I've dubbed preservation through dissemination. The more copies of something that exist, the more likely it is to survive for future generations. (Again, I know almost no one in my family reads this blog, so I have no qualms about revealing their gifts here. If any of you happens to check in, I'd appreciate your discretion.)

Family Cookbook
This wasn't a Christmas gift, but it was one of the best gifts I've ever gotten. When my cousin got married several years ago, she asked for a book of family recipes, and her sister enlisted the help of the whole family in compiling one. When I got married 18 months ago, my sister piggybacked off of the recipes our cousin had already collected, adding to them recipes from the other side of the family, from my husband's family, and from our friends. When another cousin got married just this month, we piggybacked again, adding recipes from her dad's side of the family as well as from her in-laws. The book keeps growing, and it's a wealth of information, delicious recipes, and family history. Of course, there are somewhat more modest ways to go about this project, too (the most recent version nearly burst the spine of the book it was in!) I could envision taking a dozen or so of a family's favorite Christmas foods and creating a family Christmas cookbook, or requesting a single recipe from each contributor (not half a dozen each, which is what some of my relatives tend to share).

I hope you can take away from this post some creative ideas about how to share your research and your family's history with your loved ones this holiday season, as well as a bit of insight into the mind of a genealogist and how to shop for him or her!


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.

The Gathering: Listowel

My husband Ben had the good fortune to inherit a collection of letters belonging to his great-grandfather, Frank Gleasure, who - God love him - saved every letter his family ever sent him from their hometown of Listowel, Co. Kerry, Ireland. We've been transcribing them and posting them online at The Gleasure Letters. A few months ago, we had the good fortune to be interviewed on Skype by Tadgh Kennelly. Kennelly is an Irish athlete living in Australia who, as part of the tourism initiative The Gathering, returned to his native Listowel and hosted the Listowel-focused episode of the tv show The Gathering.

During the episode, they tell the story of my ancestors-in-law among tales of other Listowel residents, past and present. (They got only minor details wrong. For example, Frank was Ben's great-grandfather, not his grandfather. But for the most part, it was pretty accurate.) The Skype interview with Ben and yours truly airs towards the middle of the episode, but pieces of the Gleasure story are told earlier, too. There's a major surprise involved for us!

Since the episode has recently become available on YouTube, I wanted to share it here. Enjoy!
 

NYC Hurricane History: The Long Island Express

When I read Aaron Naparstek's article The Big One, I learned, for the first time, about some of the major hurricanes that had hit NYC in previous years. I decided on two storms that I wanted to look at in more depth, since they would have impacted my Brooklyn and NYC ancestors - the 1893 hurricane, and the 1938 "Long Island Express." After finishing up Monday's post on the "Ruinous Gale" of 1893, I started to look into the 1938 storm, and was startled to see it referred to as both the Long Island Express and the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. The Long Island Express was that hurricane? I've heard of that hurricane!

Most people with even a passing interest in the history of New England have heard of the 1938 hurricane that decimated the coast and killed hundreds, but it had never even occurred to me to wonder what effect it had had on New York. Hurricanes do not usually manage to hit New England without impacting NYC and Long Island, of course, but I never made the connection, not even when I spent two days thinking about New York being hit by a hurricane in 1938.

New York papers from the day after the Long Island Express hit were substantially more alarming than from the day after the 1893 storm. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle headline proclaimed "19 Die, 39 Missing in L.I. Hurricane."

22 September 1938

The Eagle devoted at least 5 pages primarily to the effects of the storm. Technology had advanced considerably since the hurricane that had hit 45 years earlier, and so you don't have to rely on my meager writing skills to give you an idea of what it was like. Instead, we have these remarkable videos to show us. (h/t to Bowery Boogie)





These focus mostly on New England, but give you a good idea of what the storm held for New York, particularly for the eastern end of Long Island, where it's power was most devastatingly felt.

Perhaps the most haunting part of the Eagle's coverage is the list of the dead, the missing, and the injured. Even a brief reading of the articles, though, shows that the list, and the count, far understate the actual damage. For example, left off the list are the 25 children who were attending a party at the home of Mrs. Norvin Greene in Westhampton Beach, none of whom had been seen since the storm. (The Greenes and their guests were later discovered to have survived.) (Murray, Around Westhampton.) 

Below is the list of dead and missing:

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 September 1938