*** Legacy Family Tree Webinars: Great Idea & Value

*** Grandpa’s Moustache cup

*** Funny names in YOUR family tree?

*** Researching UK Vital Records Getting Easier

*** More Washington Trivia

Online learning, or personal-to-you-at-home learning, is a great thing. Legacy Family Tree Webinars fill this bill entirely. And they’re having a Black Friday sale!  With membership, you get all the new webinars as well as having access to the webinar archives.  I signed up and have mentally committed myself to viewing these webinars and increasing my research knowledge. How about you? 

** Identical Twins Question

** Ode to Moses Lake

** Queries: Would you pay for a query placed here? 

From the “Ask Marilyn” in the Sunday Parade magazine:  “If identical twins marry identical twins and each couple has children, are the children genetic cousins or siblings?” Her answer: “They are genetic siblings. If their DNA were examined, you couldn’t even tell which child was born to which set of parents. Not that any of the kids would look alike. They would look just as different from each other as any other siblings.” Any twins marry twins in your family tree?

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Found this in the Big Bend Register, Vol. 25, 2004, “Ode to Moses Lake,” penned in 1908:

There has been a wild commotion on Moses Lake’s green shore

A big dam has been constructed that will all the water store.

Upon its blue and sunlit waters you’ll hear the whistle of a boat

From the chuck, chuck of a gas launch to the steamboat’s deep toned note

It has lain long years as idle water dancing in the sun

God put it here for usefulness; man has now the work begun

Where the sly coyote and rabbit roamed at will so wild and free

Man has planned to make a city and a hummer it will be

It surmounts a grassy hilltop; pick the place you like the best

Where the sun rises at morning or where the boats land on the west

Streams of water will be flowing through the sagebrush and the sand

Big red apples will be growing; the finest fruit of the land

Then we’ll give to great Wenatchee the closest race of her life

And if you don’t just believe it see this land and bring your wife

Railroad lines will soon be running north and south and east and west

And the steamboats will be sailing on the blue lake’s rolling crest

And when other people tell you how their land is just a snap

Just brace up, be sure and answer Moses Lake is on the map!

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The WSGS Board is considering some simple fund raising ideas; we must fund our project and educational grants, of course.

 Would you pay $5.00 for a Pacific Northwest query placed on this blog????  Your query would remain “forever” in the blog archives and would instantly reach hundreds of eyes. Think about the possibilities!

Please email and let me know:  Donna243@gmail.com.  

** Did your ancestors meet via a newspaper ad?

** Max Rockover: Is He In Your Tree? 

**Runes: Germanic/Viking alphabet

Continue reading →

** Mount Rainier

** Is your society contributing to the WSGS blog?

** “Weather Forecasting Game to End in N.W.”

** Snoqualmie Pass closed for 30 days???

Did you know that the highest point in Washington is our Mount Rainier. This peak was named for Peter Rainier (1741-1808), a British soldier who fought AGAINST us in the Revolutionary War. Anybody but me wonder why HIS name was chosen for this majestic mountain?????

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Most genealogical societies within our region do submit information to us about their upcoming meetings, seminars, workshops, etc. Does yours? If you are a regular reader of this blog, have you noticed posts about your society’s doings? Perhaps you might ought to ask your Board about this? Why turn down such wonderful free publicity???

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On September 22, 1947, this article appeared in the Tacoma News Tribune: “Harried, heckled and much maligned meteorologists along the Puget Sound who have borne the brunt of long-range weather miscalculations for lo! these many years are breathing great sighs of relief.

The head men in the weather bureau in Washington, D.C., announced that its new forecast center at Seattle would probably begin operations about Nov. 1st.

This means that the Pacific Northwest will not have to depend henceforth on San Francisco for its long-range forecasts, which has been the case for more than the 35 years Tacoma Observer Ross O. miller has been in the service.

Miller, who has always felt that the San Francisco forecasts were not any too accurate for Puget Sound if only because of the distance involved, sees a definite improvement in the business of weather prediction with the advent of the new center in Seattle.

“Puget Sound weather has always been difficult to forecast at best,” Miller pointed out. “The state is too big for accuracy in the blanket predictions that have been coming from the Bay City.”

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According to a Seattle newspaper for November 23, 1959: “Snoqualmie Pass, the state’s major 4-lane route through the Cascades, will be closed for a minimum of 30 days (and could be up to a year) due to the rampaging south fork of the Snoqualmie River.”  Can you imagine that happening today??? Right before Thanksgiving?????? 

*** For whom is Bonneville Dam named?

*** Where is/was Hicksville, Neppel, Culver, Parnell and  McEntee’s Crossing?

*** How many counties were carved from huge Stevens County?

*** Scottish heritage in the Pacific Northwest?

*** Kudos to Blue Mountain Heritage (pub of Walla Walla Gen Soc) and the Big Bend Register (pub of the Grant County GS)

Bonneville Dam was named for Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville who was at Fort Walla Walla on March 4, 1834. Big honor, I would say, for a one-time visit from a Frenchman. (Who might know the rest of the story?)

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Hicksville’s name was changed in 1911 to Wheeler in Grant County, east of Moses Lake.  Neppel was the first name for the town of Medical Lake. The bitsy town of Culver was west of Blewett, up hill on Culver Creek. The town of Parnell was founded on August 6, 1889. The site was 1/2 mile south of Hartline and was was established because it was expected that the railroad line would cross there but that failed to materialze and Hartline got the deal. Oh, and Hartline was named for John Hartline on 28 Jul 1890. Did you know that McEntee’s Crossing was the first name of Coulee City? By 1900 the place became the city of Coulee and in 1937 officially became Coulee City. I think this sort of history is important to those having Washington ancestry; wish I did but I do not.

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Originally Stevens County was enormous and twelve counties (or parts of counties) were carved from that territory. Stevens County was named in 1863 to honor Isaac Stevens as Washington’s first governor.

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Sandy Doutre was the speaker at the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society’s meeting in September last. Sandy is a local “guru-expert” on Scottish history, heritage and research. As part of her talk, Sandy explained that Scots came for the gold in the Pacific Northwest, which, early on, comprised a part of New Caledonia (Canada) which was “owned” by the Hudson’s Bay Company which employed many Scots.  According to Sandy, all of these are Scottish heritage names:  Glasgow, Aberdeen, Butte, Anaconda, Colville, Rathdrum, Selkirk Mountains, Athol, Murray, Colfax, Pomeroy……. and many more that I wasn’t quick enough to scribble down. This is not to mention the Highland Terrier dog, the Angus cow, the Chisholm Trail and much more, quipped Sandy. I did not realize that there was such a huge Scottish presence in the Pacific Northwest but guess I should have. 

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Teaching Tip: There is much to be learned from a genealogical society’s periodical, even very old ones. While I think that the Walla Walla Gen Society and the Grant Co Gen Soc no longer meet, their publications live on. Having some library time not too long ago, I paged through some back issues of the Blue Mountain Heritage and the Big Bend Register and was very impressed by how much local history they contained…. WPA pioneer interviews, pioneer reminiscences, town histories, biographical sketches, Letters Home, obituaries, newspaper bits, high school graduation lists…and this list could go on and on. If you know the COUNTY where your people once lived, DO NOT overlook searching the back issues of any genealogical or historical publication originating in that area. 

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Joke to Close:  She:  “What’s that lump on your head?”  He: “Oh, that’s where a thought struck me.” Duh.

Quite short today; just back from cruising the coast of Norway. And it was fabulous (Hurtigruten; we recommend it). I learned that second to Ireland, Norway lost the most folks to emigration and I could certainly imagine why. Too many rocks, too little farm area, too few forests, rocks, cold seawater, monotonous diet (cod), etc. Apparently many left from Trondheim where next to a statue of Leif Ericson (hubby John posing) there was a 30-foot long wall with plaques bearing the names and dates of many of those emigrants. Is all this info in a database somewhere???

No wonder they left………. what would lure YOU away from such as this? See the drying codfish?

Granger Tombstone Story

By Donna Potter Phillips,  July 2016

Having a nice summer walk in my favorite place, Fairmount Cemetery (west end of Wellesley in Spokane) I happened to park right next to this grave marker.

Father, Charles W. Granger, 1854-1935  //  Mother, Edith C. Granger, 1868-1962.

Right next to this was a marker for their son:

Louis (named after his paternal grandfather) was born in 1893 in Washington and died on 21 Jun 1919 at the family home in Nine Mile Falls.

According to the history etched upon his tombstone, Louis served as a member of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. The 91^st Division was constituted in 1917 at Camp Lewis, Washington and departed for England in the summer of 1918. Louis was with his unit in Sept 1918 when they fought in France at the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. In 1919 the 91^st Division was inactivated at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Louis died on 21 Jun 1919 and I wonder if it was from wounds of war??

Continue reading →

** Understanding A Bit More About 18^th Century Photography

** Reacquaint Yourself With Cyndi’s List

** Washington History Trivia: Bing Crosby’s Pipe

** Following Up: Digital Public Library & FamilySearch

The following is quoted from Edward Rutherfurd’s book, New York;  I found his explanation of these facts so clear that I thought to share them with you:

1863, page 413:  “His photographic studio was well equipped….. like the other photographers on the Bowery, his bread-and-butter business in recent years had been taking quick portraits of young men standing proudly, or sheepishly, in their unaccustomed uniforms, before they went off to fight again the South. Quicker than the old daguerreotype to take, easy to reproduce on paper, he’d get thirty customers a day sometimes. It paid the rent. At first, these small “carte-de-visite”-size portraits had seemed jolly enough, like taking someone’s picture at the seaside. Gradually, however, as the terrible casualties of the Civil War had mounted, he had realized that the dull little portraits he was taking were more like tombstones, last mementoes, before some poor fellow vanished from his family forever. And if he tried to make each humble one as splendid as he could, he did not tell his customers the reason.”

1871,  page 488: The character was explaining why he didn’t get a photo of Lincoln speaking the Gettysburg Address…… Lincoln was so brief and:  “It had been no easy business getting a picture in the Civil War. The photographs were always taken in 3-D, which meant that two plates had to be inserted simultaneously into a double camera, one to the left, one to the right. The glass plates had to be quickly cleaned, coated with collodion, then, while still wet, dipped in silver nitrate before being put into the camera. The exposure time might only be a few seconds, but then on had to rush the plates, still wet, into the mobile darkroom. Quite apart from the difficulties of having people in motion during the seconds of exposure, the whole process was so cumbersome that taking pictures of battlefield action was almost impossible. “

Continue reading →

** Tibetan Dress Customs

** Why You Might Not Find Your Ancestor’s Grave

** Egyptian Genealogy

** Was Your Ancestor a German Redemptioner?

From the book, Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer, who lived in Tibet in the 1940s and 1950s and wrote his famous book in 1982. And was turned into a great movie with Brad Pitt!  I learned so much about the Tibetan people from enjoying this book and could have copied out endless bits for you but will settle on this one….just in case you might have Tibetan ancestors:

“(Now spring had come). The season of sandstorms was over, and the peach trees were in blossom. On the neighboring peaks, the last remnants of the snow shone blindly white in the warm sunshine. One day the summer season was officially declared to have begun, and the summer clothes might be worn. One had no right to leave off one’s furs when one wanted to. Every year, after considerations of the omens, a day was fixed on which the notables and monks put on summer dress. The weather might have been very warm or snowstorms might follow. That did not matter. Summer dress must be work from that date only. The same thing happens in autumn, when winter dress is officially resumed. I continually used to hear complaints that the changeover had come too coon or too late and that people were stifling hot or half frozen.”

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This next was penned by Janet Margolis Damm, member of the Whitman County Genealogical Society (which is 75 miles south of Spokane). She wrote and submitted this bit to her society’s newsletter and I share it with you with her permission.

Why you will not find your ancestors headstones! By Janet Margolis Damm

If you have ever been to France or Germany or many other countries in Europe looking for your ancestor’s gravesites, you probably couldn’t find any headstone. I visited cemeteries in Germany in the early 2000s looking for my ancestors and could not find stones with a death date before the 1960’s. At the time no one told me about the charnel house tradition. I didn’t even know what the word charnel meant. A few months ago I found out and I am passing this knowledge on to you.

Charnel House, Beinhaus, bone house or ossuary are all names for the same thing. A charnel house is a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored. They are often built near churches for depositing bones that are unearthed while digging graves. In countries where ground suitable for burial was scarce, corpses would be interred for approximately five years following death, thereby allowing decomposition to occur. Germany interred remains for 30 years. After this, the remains would be exhumed and moved to an ossuary or charnel house, thereby allowing the original burial place to be reused.

Donna:  You want some most interesting browsing and then reading? Google the term ossuary German and you’ll get an afternoon’s worth of reading hits.

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** Banks Lake & the Rainbow

** Digital Public Library of America

** Going to Salt Lake City and the Family History Library?

** Norwegian Ten Commandments

** Check Out HistoryGeo.com (thanks Jeanine Barndt)

Last August, hubby and I spent a few sunshiny happy days on Banks Lake. One morning a thunderstorm came up and created a double rainbow! We live in such a beautiful state!

Do you know the history of this man-made lake? According to Wikipedia:

Banks Lake is a 27-mile long reservoir in central Washington in the United States. Created at the time of the Grand Coulee Dam, the reservoir was planned to irrigate the entire central basin of Washington. This eventually did happen, and is on-going, but electricity produced by the dam is also of vital importance.

Due to the nature of the lake, lying as it does within the walls of a basaltic coulee, there are few access points. To me this makes it a boater’s paradise where you can nearly have the entire lake to yourself. And the water gets delightfully warm enough for swimming!  If you’d like to visit, check out Steamboat Rock State Park.

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Ever used the DPLA? The Digital Public Library of America? The DPLA is one of the most useful online libraries available today. It is new, having been formed less than two years ago. It is not a genealogy library. Rather, it is a general purpose library that just happens to have a lot of genealogy material in addition to other topics. The DPLA’s mission is to make cultural and scientific works more accessible to the public.

Dick Eastman, in his weekly online newsletter, wrote about the DPLA back in February 2015. At the time of his newsletter, he wrote that the DPLA listed over 8,000,000 items in its catalog from libraries, archives and museums. (Just checked; now it’s over 13,000,000.) Doing a search on the word genealogy returned a list of 65,707 items available via the library’s online portal.

The DPLA serves as a portal to provide new ways to search and scan through the united collection of millions of items that may be stored on any of thousands of other library websites. This alone gives me reason to want to know more. Of course there is a YouTube video about the DPLA for your viewing educational pleasure.

Check it out:  www.dp.la  (Yes, a pretty simple web address.)

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How to prepare to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City….. are you planning a visit anytime soon? Especially if it’s your first time, please do take advantage of the tips listed below in the FamilySearch Wiki article:  Go toFamilySearch Wiki

1. Click on Family History Library
2. Click Visit to the Library.

Another Suggested method found on the updated FamilySearch site

1. Click onwiki.familysearch.org/en/Main_Page
2. Click onFamilySearch Centers.
3. Click onTheFamily History Library Salt Lake City, Utah.

4 Click for Additional Library Information

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Barbara Zanzig, a friend with whom I rendezvous every year at the Salt Lake Christmas Tour, shared with me the Ten Commandments with a distinctive Norwegian flavor and twist. I share them with you. You’ll love ‘em!

Da Ten Commandments
1. Der’s only one God, ya know.
2. Don’t be idolizing dat fish on yer mantle.
3. Cussin’ ain’t Minnesota nice.
4. Go to church even when yer up nort.
5. Honor yer folks.
6. Don’t kill; Catch an’ release.
7. Der’s only one Lena fer ever Ole.  No cheatin’.
8. If it ain’t yer lutefisk, don’t take it.
9. Don’t be braggin’ ’bout how much snow ya shoveled.
10. Keep yer mind off yer neighbor’s hotdish.

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Did your ancestors settle in western states and were first landowners? If so, you can find the information about their land at www.historygeo.com. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming land records were recently added to the database. I don’t have ancestors in those states but I did find great-great-grandfather in Kansas. Doing a search on some surnames of those I know settled in these areas produced a lot of results. Check this database for your ancestors. Read the article about these 3.3 million original landowners added to historygeo.com.

Blog.historygeo.com/2015/06/08/western-states-added-to-first-landowners-project/  

(Jeanine Barndt is the Head Librarian for the Heritage Quest Research Library in beautiful downtown Sumner, Washington; this bit is from the HQRL Newsletter for Fall 2015.)