Genealogy Road trip of 2015

Genealogy Road Trip

Over the next few blog posts, I will be chronicling my recent road trip across the mid west of the USA, talking about my successes as well as my failures.  My goal is to make you laugh and cry, but to also help everyone who is planning a trip like this, so your trip is successful.




 

Day one: We, (my daughter Liz and I) left Charlotte on a Wednesday after I got off work.  The car was packed, (over packed actually) and we were raring to go! Bellies were full and funny posts went on facebook, "Westbound and down, loaded up and trucking"... Our first stop, pre loaded into "Tommy" our GPS, was about 12 hours away in Mt Carmel Il.  




But of course we had to get through North Carolina, Kentucy, and Indiana first. We had driven this first leg in NC many times, as it went to Asheville, and we used to go to the local Girl scout camp several times a year.



As we drove along, passing all the highway exits, random memories flashed in my head.  My thoughts wandered; At this exit you can see the McAdenville Christmas lights, I took the girl scouts to the Gastonia Planitarium off this exit, I had a papered chef party at this exit, and so on.  Once we got to Shelby, thoughts and prayers went out to families from the horrible SC murders, as we passed where the killer was caught.

It was dark when we hit Tennessee, but my goal was to get as close to Mt Carmel as I could, so we would have lots of daylight to "shoot" the cemetery, where my birth mother's family was buried when we got there.

Mountain driving is  not fun, especially in the dark, but there wasn't much traffic or oncoming lights to blind me as I drove.

Kentucky was the next state we came to, and Liz had been asleep for hours, as I drive on, singing to the songs on the iPod, trying to stay awake.

I finally stopped in Lexington, to get a few hours of sleep, as it was after 2 am and I had been up for almost 20 hours.

Day one was a complete success! went through 3 states, and almost to our 1st genealogy stop on the adventure.

Stay tuned for the next installment!

Don't Be a Cow About It!!!!

Everyone in this cycle of the genealogy Do-Over is busy writing down what their plans are to help keep them on track.  Everyone is posting their documents and one really struck my fancy....

Thanks to Melissa Elder of Thornbury NZ, for her funny but honest approach to her Ethics and Practises (yes those down under spell it that way, and not how us "yanks" (people from the USA) spell it.

Here are screen shots of her Code of Ethics and Practises and are pretty spot on.

Here's hoping we can see more from Melissa, as she has a great way with words.

tagging files in windows explorer

This is a video I did to show how to use the tagging feature in windows prior to WIN 10.

WIN 10 video 

By using tags, you can limit your file name and the great thing about tags is they are searchable

Do Over -Week one Round 3

This week starts the third round of the Genealogy Do- Over.

The Do- Over is where you look at how you have been researching, your habits both good and bad, and the research documents you have.

Each week you have a list of "to do" items for you to think about, review, then evaluate how you can make the items more effective in your research.

A foundation is always the most important thing to establish so I decided to create a webinar to help us understand why designing the filing system is paramount before adding/renaming and filing our documents and photos for our genealogy proof.

Feel fre to have a look at the webinar, as it also will apply to any organization task you set out to "do over"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIz0y_9f0L4

Genealogy Tool Box

Genealogy Tool Box

Week 5 (I think) was about building/creating a genealogy tool box.  A virtual place to store all your websites (outside of the top sites like ancestry, fold3, family search)

Well I've dabbled in all of the options mentioned in this week's topic.

First and the most difficult (IMO) is the external list method.

This is where you keep a separate sheet in excel /or word or worse on paper to keep all of your links.

For me, this method is cumbersome way to keep track.  One would have to take the spreadsheet with them (or have it online somewhere) and if storing it online is the goal, there are much easier ways than a spreadsheet or document. Another thing to think about is, does the computer you will be using somewhere else, have the software to open the document/spreadsheet. Even with Google docs, some public computers are blocking the use of google docs, so now we have this wonderful list of places to search, but alas, we don't have access.

Now let's move on to what most people would say is obvious, a browser's bookmarks.  While they work great for a one computer use, however with the new updates coming out for browsers, bookmarks may be portable.

One of the suggestions was to build a weebly site, which I tried, and even with my website building background, I found it cumbersome and hard to manipulate the book marks I already had. So I scrapped that after about a week of beating my head against the wall.

Way back in the day I came across a website I absolutely loved.  It was called back flip.  It was a site you logged into and you could log the sites you visited with the click of a button.  There was a place to give the site a name, a description as well as the link.  This was any computer you went to, all you had ot do was log into back flip and poof! there were all your links.  I loved back flip and promoted it to everyone, this was "cloud computing" in its infancy.  I'm sad to report, back flip fell by the wayside.

So fast forward a few years and we now have Icrumz.

 

This setup is similar to back flip.  It is a website where you set up a free account, and then you drag a icon to your toolbar.

Icrumz icon

Any website you visit, can be added to Icrumz, by clicking on that icon. So I can be on face book, see a link I want to save, click on the link, then click on the icon.  The links in Icrumz can be moved around with in a folder, or across folders.  If you are at another pc, just log onto Icrumz and your links are there, drag the icon to the top of the tool bar, and you can save additional websites you find.


So if you want something easy to use, with no learning curve, Icrumz is the answer.

A hero among us

In March my daughter and I went to DC for a well deserved spring break vacation.  Mother nature had other ideas...

We left Charlotte around 10 pm and made it to the NC/VA border until sleep took over, so we stopped for the night, when the rain came.  We found a nice quiet hotel, and fell asleep quickly, only to awake at 7 am to sleet and ice covering the parking lot, road, and vehicle.  Not to be deterred, we trudged onward towards DC.

I white knuckled it the whole trip, and we wound up stopping every hour, because of the tense driving conditions.   At one point I was ready to turn around but we really wanted to go and enjoy the week. 

A trip that shouldn't have taken more than 4 hours from where we started at 7 am, was still in progress  at 2 pm, and we were only in Alexandria.  We found the first hotel we could,

Comfort Inn Alexandria West - Landmark on Duke Street.  This is where we would call home for a week.  Luckily they had free breakfast (at IHOP no less) every day, and FREE shuttle to the metro every half hour.

That evening we went into DC to wander and to our surprise, (Ok so I dont watch much news or read the papers) we find a controversial VIP is arriving and all the streets are blocked off.  We asked if we could watch, as there was no one really interested in the chaos happening around us.  So we saw the VIP arrive, and got many pictures.  Cold and wet, we return to the warmth of our hotel.

On day 2 we go to the Holocaust museum, and it was overwhelming to a very young 18 year old (my daughter) who had really only heard of WWII and Hitler and the horrors of the concentration camp.  We were looking at the glass wall of people who had died in the concentration camps and I found her crying, so I comforted her.  It was a lot to take in.  The historical event became real for her at that moment.

Further on, there was a wall of people who had been honored for their assistance in helping the Jewish people escape Germany,  and she began looking at the names.  On the back side of that list of names, we found one that caused us to pause.....It was the name of a woman Katarzyna Filipek; the  

same surname of her Grandfather!!  More tears, but good tears, but it again gave a surreal reality to the muesum.

Here is a post about this very brave woman from http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/list2.htm

23. FILIPEK, Katarzyna, 47, farmer, from Tokarnia, Near Nowy Targ, Cracow

murdered in January 1944 by Germans following a denunciation; since June 1943 she sheltered 6 Jews: Samuel Szternlicht, his 2 daughters, son-in-law and 2 grandchildren, who died with her. She was posthumously awarded the medal "Righteous Among the Nations"

This lit the genealogy fire for my daughter again, and she has been going non stop to find out how she is related to this HERO.

 After we came home, we discovered many names of other Filipeks who unfortunately perished in the Concentration camps.  Our hearts break when we think of them, but we are proud to know there was a HERO who helped those who asked for her help.

We are planning another trip to DC and plan on spending most of our time in the National Archives, to gather info on  those relatives who were taken too soon.

More of the story

http://www.sprawiedliwi.org.pl/en/family/753,filipek-katarzyna/