Sentimental Sunday

Today I just want to vent a bit. Do you ever get emotional about the records you are researching? I do.

I get frustrated at the census takers and clerks who scrawled. A few choice words might even pass my lips. Like this one. Where did she go from Halleby?

I ooh and ahh over beautifully written records. How about this writer? I wish my handwriting were as beautiful.

As I research the records for a family, I get to know them. I know where they lived and about their extended family and friends. Sometimes I do the happy dance.

But there is one group of records that always leave me feeling bittersweet -- the Swedish church records of the 18th and 19th centuries. They are comprehensive, as long as the parish clerk was diligent. I can follow my ancestors and their families from home to home, parish to parish, birth to death.

What breaks my heart, over and over, is the high infant mortality rate. I'm happily rolling along and then bam! A baby or young child dies and I feel the sorrow.

I'm sure that other countries experienced the same loss, especially during the years the crops failed. I know it's not unique to Sweden.

I've spent quite a bit of time in the Swedish records over the past couple of weeks, especially using the more recent records from a free weekend with ArkivDigital. I decided to follow one of my great-grandfather's brothers who changed his name. As I traced forward, I saw the children dying until only one child remained, a daughter who married. My heart was saddened when she and her first baby died within a day of each other.

Of my great-grandfather and his six siblings, there are only descendants left today from my great-grandfather. I believe that our branch survived only because he came to America with his wife and children.

I leave you with a look at one of these wonderful, yet heart-wrenching records. Dad Carl Lagerholm works on the railroad, I believe as an engineer. Mom Ester Fors is a housewife. We see their birthdates and parishes, their marriage date and the parish from which they came, with the arrival date. And we see the wee one with the little cross in front of his name, with the dates of his birth and death. Erik's birth date is wrong, as it has a transcription error. The birth and death records revealed that he was born in 1890 and died at two days old.

Carl and Ester did have more children, including a son who joined his aunts and uncles in America.

I have more work to do in the Swedish records. That means more sad times ahead as I look for the remnants of my family.

Five for Friday -- A Day Late

The past few days have been a great learning opportunity and I want to revisit my five steps for scrapbooking heritage photos by sharing some of the things I've recently learned. First the five steps:

1. scan it
   
2. scrap it
   
3. research it
   
4. talk about it
   
5. share it
   

Here are five tools or goodies, most from the storytelling sessions featured at rootstech 2013.

1. Scan. Learn about digital preservation from a new, FREE, publication from the Library of Congress. The title is “Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving”and you can read about it and download the PDF at the LOC website. This is a collection of LOC blog posts that talk about organizing and preserving our digital and physical archives. There is at least one post that discusses the future of our online lives after we die. This is an important topic we don't often think about.
   
2. Scrap. Learn about creating a digital presentation -- a digital scrapbook -- that can be played at family reunions, emailed, or even mailed on a DVD. Visit rootstech.org, scroll down to Saturday and click on the session: Digital Storytelling: More than Bullet Points - Denise Olson. She starts slow, but the payoff is in perhaps the last 20 minutes.
   
3. Research. I'm a map person and I learned about some wonderful online map sites. If you are a map person, be sure to watch Finding the Obscure and Elusive: Geographic Information on the Web - James Tanner. Visit rootstech.org, and scroll down to Thursday to find this session.
   
4. Talk. TOP PICK! Listen to a wonderful storyteller who includes tips on finding our our own stories and those of our families. She also shares tips for crafting those stories. She will make you laugh, she will bring a tear to your eye, she will touch you. Visit rootstech.org, scroll down to Thursday and click on the session: Tell it Again (Story@Home) - Kim Weitkamp.
   
5. Share. Check out a nice example of an audio/video presentation from social media guru Jyl Pattee during the Friday Keynote address. Jyl audiotaped phone calls with her grandmother and merged the audio with photos to make a video to share with her family on YouTube and Facebook. She focuses on creating and capturing special moments, and she touches on using social media such as Instagram and blogging. Jyl also shares a heritage recipe for banana cookies. I'm looking forward to trying her recipe. Visit rootstech.org, and scroll down to Friday to find the keynote session.

Although I loved the storytelling ideas, the map information presented by James Tanner was the most useful for my research. Have you ever clicked on the GPS coordinates at the top right of a Wikipedia page? I had never even realized it was clickable. This image is from his example. Try bringing up your favorite location in Wikipedia and then clicking on the coordinates to see what happens.

I hope some of these tips will resonate for you.