Thursday, August 9, 2012

Another Bloggers Genealogy Journey

I am a passionate cat lover, I love all things cat. Today I was pleasantly surprised as I was looking at a fellow cat bloggers blog to see that she had a section on her genealogy.


Since it is a pet blog, some of the writing is from the pets point of view and the blogger goes by a username of Glogirly. But the family history is real and her story is real.

She was adopted as a baby and then as an adult, found her path to the family she never knew by researching online. I am always amazed to read such wonderful stories about people connecting with family.




I contacted her on Facebook for permission to share her story here and she gladly agreed to let me share. Thank you so much Glogirly!!

She has little mini chapters or blog posts of her journey to find her family and titles them as chapters on her blog.

Her story begins here:


http://www.glogirly.com/2011/10/searching-for-girl-prologue.html

This link has a list of all the chapters to her story. You will be craving to read the rest by the end of chapter 3.

http://www.glogirly.com/p/another-mother.html


I hope you enjoy reading her story as much as I have.
Thanks for taking the time to read it.


Thursday, May 17, 2012

I Just Joined History Pin

There is a fairly new site called HistoryPin that allows you to pin your photos to a map and create collections.

I put a pin icon on the top right of the page and then used their code to put a widget on the bottom of this page that shows a few things. So far I only have a couple of photos. But you can click on them and read the story which is the description I added. 

The map is a little slow to come up on the blog widget, it is faster on the site.

Here is what it looks like down way down on the bottom of this blog after I clicked on the photo and the map.


Since most of my Kansas relatives all lived in Parsons for many years, I thought this would be a great location to use this. 

I plan to put a photo where each of the family homes were per the census data I have. I think it will be really fun to see how close everyone really lived in Kansas.

I was hoping to join with other family members but it looks like you can only see your own stuff on your own map. But each member can publish a collection, so that will be interesting to see grow.

Scroll down now to the bottom and check it out. You might be happy you did.

If you are using it, please leave me a comment. Maybe we can inspire each other.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

A Genealogy Healing

Many of us know that divorce is hard on our children. Without going into my personal details, I can share that my kids lost their father to cancer when one was in elementary school and the other in Jr. High school.

I just recently finished scanning a bunch of their father's photos and couple of their grandparents and great grandparents. I put them on my family history photo blog and then sent both the kids a message on Facebook that the photos were up.

The kids (now adults) were thrilled to see the photos and I wrote a little bit about their father's life. My son asked me to see if I could find some data on a particular subject so I started searching.

This is where the surprise happened.

You see, we did not know what happened to their father because of the divorce, his family never let us know where the ashes went. We heard several stories and one family member said they went to find him at a cemetery and they could not. So we just figured we would never know.

While searching on Ancestry a hint came up on their father's name. I clicked on it and lo and behold it was a Findagrave link! 

It turned out to be the great grandfather of the kids and there was more than one photo attached. Scrolling through the photos, THERE IT WAS!  The headstone for my kid's father!! 

I quickly got in touch of the kids, they were so happy and relieved to know where he is now. After that I left a message for the wonderful person who added him into Findagrave.

It feels so great to solve a family mystery and make my kids recover a part of them that was missing.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

My New Flip Pal Scanner Is Great

One of the things I received for Christmas was a Flip Pal Scanner.

This is a dream for anyone who loves to scan photos and get them digitized. This is an amazing tool for a family historian who is on the move looking for data and photos and want to scan a copy on the fly. The scanner is battery operated and very small.

I got my scanner out of the packaging and had it up and running in minutes. I just followed a few steps and weeeee I was scanning.



It does some really cool things too. The gray plastic lid snaps off so you can get hard to fit items like a book page on the scanner.

Here is a quick YouTube video that gives you an overview of the scanner.


The scanner scans in either 300 dpi or 600 dpi, you choose which you want to use.  I have taken one photo that I scanned with my full size flat bed scanner and rescanned it with the flip pal. 
You can see the 2 scans here of my father and his 2 brothers:

Scanned at 300 dpi with flip pal scanner

Scanned at 300 dpi with full size flat scanner

Hopefully you can tell on your computer that the Flip Pal scan is excellent!
I can adjust the contrast and brightness with my computer photo editing software. You can also buy software from the Flip Pal company.
You can scan large items and there is a stitching software that helps you fit the items together into one large image. I haven't done a stitched photo yet so I will have to add a new post later to share how that works out for me.


Here is a video to demo that someone else made that shows how to stitch photos together.

The scanner comes with a small 2 gig card that at 300 dpi estimates over 1200 photos will fit.
You can take the card out and then load them on your computer through a card adapter. The scanner comes with a card to USB adapter.


I haven't bought one yet, but you can buy an Eye Fi memory card that will load your photos onto your computer over your Wi-Fi network. You don't have to take the card out, just sent the pics over the Wi-Fi.

So I have tons of photos to scan and I can now just sit in front of the TV and scan a ton of these small photos. Then load them onto the computer and work on them at a later time.

I need to copy them to disc too. I don't want to scan then more than one time. 

You can also scan fabric and objects. Do you have a swatch of cloth from grandma's dress or fancy buttons? Perhaps a WWII metal from a grandparent. 

Search on YouTube and you will find lots of uses for this scanner, even scrapbooking.


I apologize for not updating this blog sooner, just so many projects going on. I hope to add an  update soon on my family history progress.