Here is a preview of the series “Who Do You Think You Are?” that starts on March 5th on NBC.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Do you have old family photos protected? Do you have any old family letters in a shoebox? You should be protecting all your family treasures. There is a local company that sells archival supplies to protect just about anything that you want to save for future generations. Bags Unlimited sells many more products than its name suggests. I have bought storage boxes, photo pages and a few different sizes of bags. One size of bags is for my postcard collection to keep them clean and protected. I also bagged some old maps and magazines. I put photos into photo pages made of polypropylene, which is archival safe. Some pages are for 4X6 photos and others are for 3.5 X 5. Odd size photos I mount to cards using archival safe photo corners and then put into a pocket. Then I put the photo pages into a binder called the “UniKeep” that seals up to keep the photos save. Those binders also work well for paper items like old ticket stubs and programs. I use photo corners to hold the items onto a 8.5 X 11 sheet of archival paper and use what are called “top loaders” that fit perfectly into the “UniKeep” binder.
Bags Unlimited also has archival storage containers for records, stamps and sports cards. If you collect just about anything, they probably have something to protect that collection.
You will quickly note when looking at the website that archival supplies aren’t cheap. I think they are well worth the price to keep family heirlooms protected.
Bags Unlimited are located at 7 Canal Street near downtown Rochester. If you live in the Rochester area you can go and pick-up your order. They are only open weekdays. I’ll tell you a secret that they don’t mention on their website nor in their catalog. If you pick up at their office they give a 10% discount. Also be sure to pick up a catalog while you are there.
Kathy Kanauer wrote an article for the Winter 2008 issue of Hear Ye, Hear Ye, the RGS newsletter, about the Town of Penfield. She mentioned that there is a Local History Room that is located in within the Penfield Public Library. I visited the LH Room today to investigate all the genealogical resources that are available. Kathy is both the person that takes care of the Local History Room and also the Penfield Historian. She has been the Historian for over 15 years, so she knows a lot about Penfield History. She spent a long time showing all that she has available. And there is a lot of records in a small amount of space.
First, there were four file drawers full of family data. A great protion of this came in or around 1985 when Penfield was celebrating their 175th anniversary. In that year they gave out Pioneer Certificates for anyone that could prove that hey had an ancestor that lived in Penfield before 1885. So people sent copies of family charts and any proof that they had of an old Penfield resident.
There is a book collection of 200 to 300 history books that were donated by Jane Terry Widger. This collection includes histories of New England and New York State. There also were census indexes of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York State. Also some NY State census records from beofre 1825 that came from the Central NY Genealogical Society publication Tree Talks.
There is a collection of old Assessment (Tax) Records. Ones for 1813, 1817-8, and 1819-20 of Penfield are just copies of the originals which probably are in the Ontario County Archives. For the years 1897 to 1959 the original Penfield Assessment records are in a storage room off LH Room. They also have copies of Assessment Rolls for the Town of Brighton for 1816 -1820. These records are good to prove that a person lived in Penfield and in most cases it shows the Town lot that they lived on.
Over the years, someone extracted the Penfield census for the years 1850 – 1915. They have microfilms of the Penfield census also. Does anyone still look at microfilms? They should, for at least the NY State census.
The collection of cemetery records includes lists of tombstone inscriptions that are readily available on-line but unique are some burial permits. Plus someone took photos of every tombstone in the Smith Cemetery and they have those.
One of the things that I always am looking for are church records and there is a good collection of Penfield church records in the LH Room. Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, St. Joseph’s Catholic, Bethleham Lutheran, Advent and East Penfield Baptist Churches are all represented. The records vary but you can expect to find membership rolls, marriages and funerals and usually some baptisms. Note that some denominations only baptized adults.
Then in one notebook there was the Penfield births, marriages and deaths for the years 1847 to 1850 and also Penfield poor records for 1816 to 1860. Very few of those early vital records still exist.
There is a bound copy of Little Nellie’s Penfield Extra (1863 – 1866) and also bound copies of the newspapers, Penfield Post Republican (1957 – 1979) and Penfield Press (1955 – 1985). They also have old diaries of early Penfield residents including a 50 year diary of Aristides F. Church that is indexed.
If you have an old house in Penfield; you would like to see the house file drawer that also includes some pictures. That brings up the collection of over 1000 old photos from around the area including some on glass negatives. And there is also a map collection from the early days to the present.
For such a small room, there are treasures in every corner. If you want to see any of these sources for research on your family, the Penfield Local History Room is in the Penfield Public Library at 1985 Baird Road. The current hours are: Monday 12-5 & 7-9; Tuesday and Wednesday 10-12 & 12:30-4:40.
Rochester Genealogical Society has moved their website. It is now at: www.nyrgs.org/. For now both the old and the new website address will work. They moved because of limitations on file size that could be uploaded to RootsWeb. There are plans to upload Church records that the Church Records Group has been filming. They will be available as PDF files so you can see copies of the original records. It also appears that the new site is faster.
I created some new pages on this site to sell off some of the books, postcards and other things that I no longer need. You can find them under the menu (to the right) and listed as Garage Sale.
If you live in the Rochester area, you can save postage charges by having me bring your purchases to an RGS meeting or you can even make a pick up at my house in Greece, NY.
It has been a low priority; but I have been upgrading all the web pages on the GenWeb of Monroe County site. I started re-working the pages in February and just finished last week. Mostly it has been just reworking the coding to XHTML standard which just makes it so the pages look the same on various browsers. There are currently 882 web pages on the site. That may sound like a lot but I remind people that I started with just one page in 1996 and have been adding since. Plus I had Google check the website and their system didn’t like that many web pages had the same title so I added “1 of 5″ or “page 3″ to many titles to distinction pages.
I didn’t really know how many pictures I had on the website. I was surprised to find that in the Pictures section that there are about 950 pictures. Most of those are are old postcards but some are pictures from old books and some are ones that I have taken over the last few years.
Time and Date is a website that I use at work to tell me the time in other time zones and countries. It also has some functions that can be used for genealogy; especially for calendars. If you run into an obit that says the person died “last Thursday” you can generate a calendar for that year on this website and tell what that day of the week was. After you create a calendar, you can change the language to another languages. So for a calendar for Belgium you can change to Dutch, French or German. The languages available depend on the country that you created the calendar for. The calendar also shows moon phases and major holidays. You can also change the calendar to show all holidays. Plus it knows when there were calendar changes. Did you know there were 11 missing days in September 1752 in the US and UK? Sweden had to add a February 30th in 1712 to make their calendar in line with the rest of Europe.
The website also has date calculators. These are useful if your genealogy program doesn’t have a calculator. One has blanks for start and end dates and will tell you the days between them. Another date calculator has a date and then lets you add or subtract years, months and days. So you could put in a death date and subtract the age listed on a tombstone and have the date of birth. Remember that calculating dates like that will always be approximate based on how good the information is that is put on a tombstone.
Put in a major city in the world and the website tells time, clock changes (daylight savings varies), moon phases and even the current weather for that city.
Lastly, a fun item on the website is the “Day and Night World Map” which shows the parts of the planet currently in daylight and night. Not very useful but it is fun to see what parts of the planet are currently in daylight. Enjoy!
One thing that I have been doing is to re-format a lot of the pages on the GenWeb of Monroe County site. Probably no one else but me cares about that. I just want all the pages to display the same on every browser. So I have been cleaning up the coding on pages on and off since about February.
I was able to borrow a copy of Rochester and the Post-Express… I went through and scanned all the pictures that were with many biographies and uploaded them to the Biographies section of GenWeb. The pictures that were there before were off a PDF file. They were very low resolution. The new pictures show a lot more detail. Check those out if you have an ancestor listed.
I also borrowed a book of letters written from Rochester from 1812 to 1814. I am still working on that. It is only about 40 pages. I saw that a copy of the book is selling on eBay for $125. I’m going to make it available for free. Some of the letters have news about events happening during the War of 1812.
Rochester Historical Society is selling their building called "Woodside" on East Avenue. It was a family home built in the early part of the 19th century. As any old home, it needs constant repairs. It is a problem with many of these kinds of organizations that they end up spending more of their energy trying to get donations to repair their buildings than anything else.
The Historical Society does have a library in their basement. They say that their collection includes some 22,000 bound volumes and 70,000 pages of manuscripts. I got a tour of the library about 15 years ago. I make the mistake of actually taking a book off a shelf and got yelled at. Probably 30 years ago, a good portion of the collection was loaned to the Rochester Public Library. That included some cemetery records, church records, Nathaniel Rochester’s personal papers, etc. It was about ten years ago that the Historical Society was close to asking the Public Library to give back everything that belonged to the Historical Society. That was averted at the last minute and now the Historical Society is in talks with renting space in the Public Library. I surely hope that the Historical Society collection will become more accessable. There is a collection of Bible records and also genealogical records from the Pioneer Committees from 1934 and 1984 that I would love to see what wonders they hold.
