[or-roots] The Lost Album and Nebraska - Thank You for sharing your technique
cjp joppe
cjpjoppe at yahoo.com
Sat Mar 10 12:25:10 PST 2012
Hello Fred and others
Thank you for posting your methodology! This is fantastic - just superb. Much much bigger than a simple "why didn't I think of that" - GENIUS!
The excell spreadsheet, timeline and map really are key in giving the whole thing perspective and "big picture" of the who/what/ when/ where etc. I'm sooooo darned excited to put this into practice with what I have - may break down some brick walls! Woo hoo!.
Thank you oodles. All the best wishes from another 'nut'
Carole
Researching Parrott, Hanson, Stringer, Corter, Rowe
...CPJ...
--- On Sat, 3/10/12, ffarner at coinet.com <ffarner at coinet.com> wrote:
From: ffarner at coinet.com <ffarner at coinet.com>
Subject: [or-roots] The Lost Album and Nebraska
To: "or-roots mail list" <or-roots at listsmart.osl.state.or.us>
Date: Saturday, March 10, 2012, 9:22 AM
Hi Linda et al,
The State was: Nebraska
County: Antelope
City & County seat: Petersburg
Town: Loretto
I am attaching a Street & Trips Map, but you probably don’t need it.
I don’t find my notes, but I’ll go through the process. If it gets too
boring just stop. I won’t mind.
1. I cataloged each photo into an Excel Spreadsheet. There were around
sixty of them.
2. I then gleaned every bit of information from every photo. That included:
a. Names on back,
b. Locations on back;
c. Dates on back; and
d. Any readable data in the photos themselves.
3. I then went through multiple sorts by:
a. Date;
b. First names
c. Last names
d. Locations
i. By state;
ii. By county; and,
iii. By city, then town.
4. From these sorts I was able to create a timeline over about fifteen years.
5. From THIS data I was able to construct a [mental] three dimensional
framework of people, locations, and interrelationships of the photo’s.
6. The timeline showed the life of a teen aged girl from about mid grade
school through college and into her first teaching job.
7. It was obvious she was quite proud of the ‘Ladies Walking Club’ [not a
real name. I never learned it.] and the ‘walks’ they took to surrounding
towns, and back home.
8. Next, a search of the available census records showed the street she
lived on, and correlated two others [boys] in the photographs as her
neighbors. They all grew up together.
9. Posting all this family and address data on a map, then looking at the
area in general I was able to discover there was a private school about
two blocks away from the place she grew up. This is/was about as far as I
could get without outside help. Did I mention I was a Federal Marine
Investigator for twenty years? LOL
10. I then went into Anywho [it’s been commercialized now] and found the
area.
11. My next thought was, “Who would probably be in a long-term, stable job
in the community, who would be in tune with the daily lives of persons of
this age group?”
12. Google Earth showed the area [today and probably then] as a farming
county with towns, even buildings that interdigitated well with the
photo’s.
13. So I called the town high school and talked with the school, head,
Secretary. I had given her only about ten percent of my information when
she interrupted me and said, “Oh! You need to be talking with [I cannot
remember this lady’s name]. She knows all about it, and is in the process
of writing a county history right now.”
14. I dialed up this lead and had a wonderful chat. She confirmed she was
a few months away from publishing and would be delighted to become the
caretaker of the album. I got her address and mailed it off to her in the
name of the La Pine Genealogical Society.
I don’t immediately find my notes on the actual investigation or the
subsequent talk I gave concerning the search and my search methods.
Sorry.
I can tell you that she grew up in the south east quadrant of Petersburg
and probably went to grade school at the private school just down the
block. The photo’s show, and satellite images now confirm this was and
apparently still it a wealthy part of town. Her first teaching job was in
the one-roomed school house in Lorreto.
And this is where the album ends. There was a single photo in the album,
un-mounted that was of a sternwheeler on the Willamette River. As I
recall there was no information on that photo.
My lingering questions include:
1. Why was this one photograph (the sternwheeler) not mounted?
2. Why was it in this album?
3. Why was this album in Portland, Oregon?
4. Was it a link to the next phase of her life? or,
5. Was the album held by a descendant and the sternwheeler just got into
the wrong album?
These questions I shall probably never learn the answers to. However, the
reason I got involved was, my roots extend back into Webster and Adams
Counties in Nebraska. For many years there was a large family gathering
of Porteniers, Farners, and allied families, in Hastings, of up to about
eighty persons. It dwindled down over the years and they stopped holding
them when it got down to only eight of us remaining. I keep hoping to
have a reason to go back sometime. Maybe I’ll be able to head north from
Hastings and see Lorreto and Petersburg myself.
There. That’s the long winded version. All I can say is, If you are still
reading this then you are truly a genealogy nut, like me!!
Fred Farner
[I am interested in the Crow’s that settled in or around Lane County,
Oregon. I have a number of them in data form, but no correlation as they
appear to be randomly buried all over the area with no discernible pattern
as yet. There is even a small town that bears the family name.]
+++A critique of my efforts show that I used the little half inch wide
Post-It notes to assign numbers to each photo. They kept falling off.
Should I become involved in a project like this again I would immediately
scan the fronts and backs of each photo into a spreadsheet. The
correlation job would have been much easier as I could have appended each
note to the scanned image page, rather than using even more Post-It’s, and
having them fall off too.+++
The attached map operates in Microsoft Streets & Trips.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Hi,
> I couldn't resist asking if the small town in Nebraska was in Washington
> Co.? Was it Blair or Vacoma or Tekama? Did you return it to its family or
> just
> the county genealogy society? Do you know any of the last names of the
> family who owned the album?
> Just asking because my family was left with a lot of old photos from a
> spinster great aunt and I spent a lot of time researching the people and
> finding
> descendants to share with and so your album interested me. Hope you don't
> mind all the questions.
> Thanks!
> Linda Purvis
> Beaverton, Or
>
>
> In a message dated 3/9/12 5:53:26 AM, ffarner at coinet.com writes:
>
>
>> I just read this post rather belatedly. Yes, we have a very active
>> genealogy society in La Pine. In addition to the normal meeting stuff,
>> we
>> were very instrumental in burying five sets of unclaimed cremains last
>> fall, complete with head stones. Our group is active.
>>
>> Last summer we 'rescued' an album of old photographs literally from a
>> dumpster. I used to be a Federal Marine Investigator. I did the
>> investigator thing and we found the album really belonged in a small
>> town
>> in Nebraska. We got it back to its home just as a history if their
>> county
>> was being written. I made a training lesson of non-standard genealogy
>> search methods out of it for our group.
>>
>> If you have questions you may contact me, and I will relay into the
>> group.
>> If anyone is in La Pine on a second or forth Tuesday stop on in at the
>> new Seniors Center and say hi.
>>
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