Of Fishing Lines, Cousin Bait, Siren Calls and . . . and . . . Blogiversaries!

Seven years ago today was Mother's Day. And, doing what one does on Mother's Day, on May 8, 2011, I thought about mothers. Thought about mothers, that is, enough to start up a blog—on mothers, of course, but also about fathers. Those two-fold strands are what weave us together into the network of humanity. Or, as I thought about it at the time, what tie us together into the tapestry of our families.

Today—2,557 posts later—is my blogiversary, the blogger's way of saying it is the anniversary of the date when I started A Family Tapestry. Of course, two thousand articles provide more than ample room for ruminating on all the aspects of genealogy—from how I started my own research to how I stumbled upon fascinating aspects of my families' stories.

And there are plenty of stories to tell—from my father-in-law's teenage days serving in the Navy during World War II to the rogue relative in my own family who almost lost his neck over his international crime spree during the years of the Great War. Room enough, in fact, to launch into episodes about my family, my husband's family, and others from our extended lines—not only here in the United States, but in Canada, and even back to Ireland, where we traveled a few years ago, and to eastern Europe, where I've tentatively explored new research resources regarding my father's family.

There seem to be never-ending supplies of stories, when it comes to these family members. Perhaps we live in a golden age of genealogy, where source documents can be at our fingertips—often at no charge to the researcher, if one knows where to look—but for whatever reason, there is an abundance of records and resources online for the curious (and persistent) family history explorer.

Whether you've been along for the ride here for years or only moments, welcome! Whether you were attracted by the wriggling cousin bait on my family history fishing line, or are a fellow geneablogger stopping by to compare notes, I love to hear from fellow researchers. Please feel free to say hi or leave a comment. I talk back!

I love blogging because it is a way to connect with like-minded people, to see who else is out there, following that same siren call to know our roots. How can we explain that to others? Thankfully, there are those who don't need an explanation. I suspect you are one of them. That is why you are here.

Above: Some family stories are more colorful than others. From the scrapbooks and photo memories of my mother's life, an undated photograph of an unidentified touring troupe she danced with (center of front row, seated, with toe shoes on). Photos and details such as these propel me to keep writing. 

Introducing a Face With No Name

One would have thought that three lines of writing on the back of a photograph would have at least included one vital detail: the name of the subject. But they didn't. I guess that's what comes of not knowing how to read the language when deciding whether to rescue an abandoned family photograph. Sadly, I don't know German.

What I do know, though, is that this picture was from the mid 1870s, at the least. So I now have in my possession a veritable antique—though that is a dubious claim to make, since my original purpose was to transport such photos from their hiding places on the back shelves of antique shops to the welcoming hands of their long-lost relatives.

Since we've been talking about this one particular photograph I found in northern California—one which apparently came from Heidelberg in Germany—I think it is about time I introduced our subject to you. Of course, this won't be a proper introduction, as I don't know the woman's name. All the same, this is a perfect moment to allow you to make her acquaintance.

I'd love it if, at some point, we could discover her name. Foiled by tiny handwriting in a foreign language, I had hoped we would have enough information already written on the photograph. But no. And so she remains a mere curiosity in my own collection, while surely someone is out there who wishes he or she could have had a picture of that very same ancestor.

Counting the DNA Aftermath

It's been a wild week, watching the news unfold with terms that we thought only genetic genealogists would use in everyday conversation. I've wondered about the fallout of seeing the tools we use for our family history research become hijacked for other investigative purposes. With today being the day to do my biweekly recap of research progress, the numbers may be supporting this cause for concern.

Granted, it is not uncommon for me to lose matches, week over week, in my 23andMe account. My "DNA Relatives" count seems to shrink on a regular basis, so losing matches today might not be unusual—until you realize the thirty six matches I lost this time represent sixteen more than I've lost in any biweekly period since I started doing this tally at the beginning of last year. (I'm now at 1,000 matches at 23andMe, incidentally.)

The 23andMe account is the only one where, while I routinely lose matches, my husband continues to gain them. Today, however, his numbers followed suit: losing thirty seven matches to total 1,035. I can't help but wonder how many of those distant cousins were inspired to yank their sharing status by breaking news of the past week.

Still, everywhere else, both my accounts and my husband's DNA accounts held up, despite any suspected repercussions. At Family Tree DNA, his account increased eighteen to total 1,933 matches, while mine moved up thirty two to total 3,021. And at MyHeritage, his account jumped 108 to reach 3,115 matches, while I gained 157 for an incredible 4,462 matches. Only at AncestryDNA was I hampered from seeing if there was any difference; lately, the policy seems to be to cap the cousin count (for fourth cousins and closer) at one thousand. On my husband's account, though, the total was well below that ceiling—at 563—so I could tell he had received an additional fourteen matches in the past two weeks.

I'm still plugging away at extending the branches of our family trees, in hopes of capturing data on all the descendants of our distant ancestors. It can be a challenge figuring out the most recent common ancestor for someone matching at a fourth cousin level if the tree we're working with doesn't even reach to third great grandparents. I figure this is a systematic way to prepare for the inevitable match questions.

In the past two weeks, that meant I was able to add 149 to my mother's tree and 335 to my mother-in-law's tree. (Alright, alright, I admit her tree is so much easier to work with!) That leaves me with a total count on my mom's tree of 13,052, and with 15,081 in my mother-in-law's tree. (Unfortunately, on both my father's tree and that of my father-in-law, I made absolutely no progress.)

Granted, that seems like a lot of work for two weeks—I do a lot of it during lunch breaks when I'm eating at my desk—but it still leaves me with that sinking feeling, every time I look at a new match, of wondering, "Who are these people?" Sometimes I feel that, after all this work, I'm no closer at solving the problem than I was before.

That's the grumpy, depressed side of me. On the bright side, I get some promising contacts from matches—admittedly rare, but still quite worth the effort—which will hopefully lead to a breakthrough on one of the family trees I'm managing. I'm still working with a match at 23andMe who likely will turn out to connect on my father's mystery pedigree—a hopeful prospect, to be sure. And just the other day, I received a note from a distant match on my mother-in-law's side of the family—who, surprisingly, lives in France, a valuable clue, indeed.

It's these unexpected connections which hold the most promise for building out our trees on lines where we've been stuck. If we think Life has thrown us curves in our own timelines, just remember that it may be that same unexpectedness which caused our ancestors to live lives which shook us from their trail, as well.

Now Indexing...Whoops, Almost Wasn't

After spending a week or so, wrestling with error messages while attempting to work on my family tree at Ancestry.com, I guess it was no surprise to learn that there must have been technical difficulties demonizing the files at FamilySearch, too.

It was time for my monthly indexing project at FamilySearch, and I logged on as usual. My customary approach is to find a project needing indexing which also matches my own research goals. Typically, that means I'm indexing something from New York or Chicago. Strangely, there was no such project available this time, even though the page stated that there were nearly eighty projects just waiting for my help. The website served up only about five or six, and when I acquiesced and clicked on one of those few, it snapped out the computer equivalent of "You can't do that!"

It took some poking around, coming at the choices page from several different angles to try and coax it into allowing me to participate. After all, that was what I had come here to do.

I'm not sure what the problem was, but it sure was a problem.

When I finally found a project that allowed me to click into it, I ended up indexing death records for counties in Iowa from 1941 to 1951. Not that I really have any direct lines I am following with roots in Iowa, but some of my mother-in-law's collateral lines did happen to wander through Iowa on their way to Minnesota from Ohio. I even indexed one record where the deceased's mother's name matched someone in my mother-in-law's tree. I may have been helping myself out even more than I thought, despite not being able to choose the project I participated in this time.

Hopefully, when FamilySearch works out whatever glitch kept me from entering and indexing projects, I'll be able to find more volunteer opportunities like that Iowa project. It's really encouraging when the process moves along as quickly as this one did. I dispatched my double batches in no time—the kind of effort that encourages a volunteer to go back and try some more. Not a bad idea, considering the more people who participate in this indexing project, the more material we all are able to search through online. Computer retrieval of records speeds up the process of research astronomically, and I'm glad to have been a minuscule part of that process through volunteering to index those digitized records.

Still the Same, No Matter the Place

People find the oddest things to note on the back of photographs. Perhaps that is only because they view such an activity in the context of their current situation: here's a picture from that fun outing we did last week, and, oh, you need to know this unusual detail about some extraneous point about the trip. No names, no dates. Nothing, at least, that an audience one hundred years later might be curious to know.

Of course, the person sending the note on the back of a carte de visite in the 1870s would not normally consider that someone in 2018 would be trying to decipher just what that fountain pen was trying to communicate. What I suspect, however, is that the great-great-grandchildren of the subject of that photograph would like to know a bit more about the thing—at least, if those great-great-grandchildren are anything like me.

Thanks to input from those of you who know people from Germany—or, in one case, someone who actually spent some time living in Heidelberg—we may soon have a verdict on exactly what that handwritten scrawl said on the back of that photograph I found in an antique store in northern California. In the meantime, I thought perhaps the rest of the material written on the back of that small photograph might reveal enough details for us to learn more about the photograph's subject.

So I put the phrases on the back of the picture through their paces at Google Translate and Google Maps.

The photographer listed on the back of this picture, Eduard Schultze, had a studio located in Heidelberg. Above the photographer's name was the entry, "79. Plöckstrasse 79." Though I know nothing about the German language, I thought it might be an educated guess to assume that entry was actually the address of the studio. So I went to check it out on Google Maps. Maybe there was a Plöckstrasse in Heidelberg in 1876, but apparently there isn't any such location there now. Düsseldorf, perhaps. But not Heidelberg.

There's no missing the fact that the photograph was taken in Heidelberg. I had to set aside that puzzle and move on to the next clue: the line printed on the bottom of the card: "Die Platte bleibt für Nachbestellungen aufbewahrt."

How very German I feel, even managing to write all that! But I still have no idea what it means. So off to Google Translate I went with my newfound ability to add umlauts to my English keyboarding capabilities. (Truth be told, I actually cheated here: having selected the translate-from dialog box's target language as German, I clicked on the keyboard icon in the window at Google Translate which said, "turn on Virtual Keyboard." Instant umlauts, which can then be cut and pasted into my text here.)

Being so smart still didn't help my cause. No matter where our ancestors posed for their portrait, all studios seemed to serve up the same offer. In Germany, as in the United States, that offer essentially gave customers a variant of the Schultze studio's promise: "The plate is kept for reordering."

No Hints from Heidelberg

If we can't figure out French handwriting, how about trying German?

I'm still determined to find a way to send home the hundred year old photograph of two adorable French Canadian children, but until I can figure out a way to tap into some local resources in Quebec, Canada, we'll have to set aside that mystery.

Meanwhile, there are more photographs to review from that shopping trip to the antique store in the hills of northern California.

True to form—Gold Rush country seems to yield such results—there were more than that one photograph with an inscription on the reverse in a foreign language. One photograph in particular was an item I couldn't resist buying. For one thing, the handwritten date revealed that was possibly the oldest picture I had found in the store. On the positive side, there were three lines of handwritten notes on the back of that photo. The down side was that I didn't attempt to read what the note said while I was still in the store.

Perhaps I should have tried that approach before buying the thing.

What I thought I was seeing was handwriting in German. After all, the photographer's imprint was from Heidelberg. Sounds pretty German to me. And the size of the picture's format seemed to fit with photographs produced during that time period. But I knew I wouldn't really be able to tell what the handwriting said until I got the thing home, scanned and enlarged it.

That done—months afterwards—I still can't read that handwriting. Perhaps that is owing to that little inconvenience of not knowing how to read German (or at least German script). What I can tell are the two dates—one being the year 1873 and the other a specific date in 1876.

While those three lines of handwriting don't seem to have provided the clues I was hoping for—a name would have been a nice touch—they do say something. And perhaps that something will be pertinent to our search. While I may not know much about the German language—and definitely not much about how it is written—perhaps someone here does.

So, to start with...anyone here know how to read German? Here's the note, as big as I can enlarge it while keeping it fairly legible.

Or maybe it isn't German, after all...

When Spelling Becomes the Villain in the Story

If someone in Montreal spelled his surname Hallée, how would people pronounce his name, once he moved to California? Would the resultant mispronunciation still be spelled the same way? Or would mispronunciation lead the unsuspecting hearer to mangle how the name is written?

I've seen that metamorphosis occur in the case of other immigrants, arriving on American shores from a place where English was, at best, a second language. Americans have not, historically, been the most careful to listen to nuances of other languages. Nor were government officials—I'm thinking census enumerators here—the most careful at replicating proper spelling as it might have been rendered in the fatherland.

So how would a census taker write down a name like Hallée? Would it be reasonable to expect that Hallie would be the result? How about Halley? Or Hally?

In trying to find the source for the hundred year old photo postcard of the two adorable children, Emile and Lucien Hallée, it occurred to me that their adoring mama might have sent the card off to a relative in California who also might have possessed the same surname. Just in case, I looked to see whether there were any Hallée families in California.

The result? While there was indeed one Raoul Hallée, born in Canada in 1912, he lived far from the northern California hills where I first discovered the photograph.

There were, however, several other spelling variations for that same surname here in California. I'm tempted to broaden my search from the properly-spelled Hallée to the wide world of spelling permutations, out in the wild west—or at least a vicinity closer to the west coast region where that darling photograph ended up abandoned in an antique shop.

Such a task, though, will complicate matters. Yes, I can use wildcard symbols in my searches, but that widens the universe of possibilities quite a bit—maybe even a bit too much. Spelling can indeed become the enemy of the unassuming researcher who just wants to find the right answer.

Maybe spelling isn't the only adversary in this search, though. To see clearly to an answer, it takes being careful about how to choose one's assumptions.

Of course, this is an example of one of my assumptions—that the photograph was sent to a family member with the same surname. Perhaps it was sent to a former neighbor—as we saw in the case of Thirza Browne Cole's collection of memorabilia from her childhood home in Greeley, Colorado. But in this case, it was encouraging to discover that there was, indeed, such a name as Hallée, both in Quebec, and in California. And yet, it will take far more than just that encouragement to be able to send the photo of P. Emile and Lucien Hallée back home to family, no matter where they live.