Portrait of a Family

When you spend your days learning things about your ancestors - three, four, ten, even fifteen generations ago - you come to think you know them just a little. In most cases, you can only imagine what they looked like as you obviously never met anyone past a great grandparent - if you even met them.  So anytime you can find a picture of an ancestor, it is like finding treasure. 

Yesterday I was working on the Shaw side of my family tree - my paternal grandmother's side - when I found a link to a picture I had never seen before.  Someone from Ohio put it up on ancestry.com.  I don't know if he's a relative, or just someone who searches through records and puts things up.  I've also come across the name of this man in connection with my maternal side of the family and I doubt he's related to both sides, although it is possible, I suppose. 

Anyway, the picture is a group photo and it was taken in about 1903. It's not in great shape.  There are two obvious places in the photograph where someone cut it as if to remove certain people from the others.  Don't know if it was deliberate, or some 5 year old child got ahold of the picture and practiced their scissors work on it.  It actually looks deliberate to me, and that makes me curious.  Was there a falling out between members of this family?

The man on the top left is my paternal great grandfather, and below him, holding a little girl, is my paternal great grandmother.  My own grandmother had not yet been born when this picture was taken.  The two people in the middle of the picture are my great great grandparents.  The man with the beard was Jacob Burden, the woman to his left Rebecca Lippincott Burden.  They had 5 children.  But Jacob had been married previously and had 4 children with his first wife.  Both sets of children are in this picture, along with spouses and grandchildren.

This picture is remarkable to me for many reasons - the fact that so many family members are gathered for one photograph.  The fact that it's not in a studio, but outside.  The fact that someone with a quality camera took it.  The fact that so many family members are living.  The fact that it even survived.  But even more remarkable to me is how attractive this family is - how much (aside from the clothing), many of them could fit in today in our society.  The children look much like other children I see running around today and the adults are all so handsome and healthy looking.  I've seen many pictures from this time period and the people in them look like they belong in the early 1900s.  These people don't.  They seem more vibrant and alive to me.  Perhaps it's the way some of the woman are holding their babies, or the the way some of them have their hands on others' shoulders, or the way the little boy, fourth from left, has his arms crossed and a scowl on his face as if he finds this whole enterprise boring and he just wants to run off and have some fun.  Some of them look as if they could simply jump off the page. 

This picture, as so many pictures, is a reminder that people who are no longer here were once alive and happy, working and playing, loving their children and sometimes grieving over the loss of someone.  They were as alive as we are now - and that is one of many reasons I love photographs that bring them back to life, if only on paper. 

How gullible do they think we are?

There's a popular television show on now called "Who Do You Think You Are?" that follows various celebrities as they search for one of more of their ancestors.  I watch it regularly and enjoy seeing people find interesting details about an ancestor's life.  I also admit I'm a little envious that I don't have several professional genealogists at the ready, able to look up documents and find hidden stories and facts about my ancestors.  At the same time, I'm irked that it is so set up, so unrealistic to those of us who search for hours at a time, on a weekly if not daily basis, for years just to find what they find on the show in ten minutes.

Each week, they make it look so easy.  All you have to do is find a grandparent's scrapbook with clues.  Then you breeze into a library or hall of records with a genealogist waiting for you.  He or she has newspaper articles or ancient data books, ready for you to find exactly what you need.  Then he or she points you to another city and another genealogist.  You hop on a plane and walk into the next library, with another expert waiting for you.  Somewhere in there, you type in the name of your ancestor on the ancestry.com website (one of the show's sponsors) and up pops exactly the record you need.  Eventually, you find out something amazing.  Your ancestor fought in the Revolutionary War, or was in debtors' prison in Europe, or was executed in the Spanish Civil War, etc. 

Last Friday's show featured Rob Lowe on the hunt for a possible ancestor that fought in the Revolutionary War. (The DAR calls such people "patriots.") Rob started out with his brother Chad and they looked in Grandma's scrapbook, which interestingly, looked nothing like any scrapbook of any grandmother I've ever seen.  Each page had only one or two documents or photos and they were perfectly placed on the page.  The documents were not yellowed, dog-eared or tattered in any way, and the scrapbook itself was brand new. 

Then Rob is off to find out about one name he came across and he finds out this man was a Hessian who had fought against the colonies in the Revolutionary War.  Rob is, of course, depressed that his ancestor was not a "patriot," until he finds out that his ancestor eventually paid taxes to the colonies after he left his job as a hired soldier, and for some reason this makes Rob eligible to apply to the "Sons of the American Revolution" for membership, which, of course, one of the experts on the show did for him.  This made me laugh.  How does someone who fought agains the American colonies during the Revolutionary War suddenly become a "patriot?"  Anyway, I don't know all the rules and regulations of the Sons of the American Revolution, so I won't comment further on that, but I have to say it really struck me during this particular episode how the show, as interesting as it is, really gives a false impression of how most of us non-celebrities find information about our ancestors. 

I asked myself after Friday's episode:  "How gullible do they think we are?"  First of all, most of us don't have scrapbooks in perfect condition.  Any documents I have - like old newspaper articles, are so yellow I can barely read them.  And most pictures from my grandparents' eras, let alone ancestors dating further back, need photo restoration.  Secondly, I don't have genealogists to help me access just the right record in some archive somehwhere in New York or Ohio or Pennsylania.  Third, I can't just hop on a plane and present myself at a library where some eager genealogist will do the work for me.  And finally, while I can go on ancestry and find much information, I can't do it the way they do on television.  First, I have to pay nearly $30 a month just for the privilege of going on the website.  Then, I can't just type in a name and find the exact I want.  I have to first find the correct data base, and that can take hours or days.  And, of course, no one is going to help me become a member of the DAR.

Then again, maybe I'm not really that envious.  While Rob Lowe, or Martin Sheen, or Paula Deen can have their families researched for them (as admitedly I had done for my husband's Croatian family because it was unrealistic for me to fly to Croatia to do it, and besides, I can't read Croatian), most of the time I have to spend hours at my computer and going to libraries and even cemeteries, in order to find the information I need.  And while that is time-consuming and at times frustrating, it is also a lot of fun. When I find information on someone that has eluded me for months, I am thrilled.  It's like discovering little pieces of buried treasure.  Pictures and stories can be even more exciting.

So doing genealogy work may be exhausting, and at times it may be tempting to have someone do the work for you as they do on "Who do You Think You Are?" But doing it myself is much more rewarding.

A Visit to the Cemetery

I never thought I'd be one of those genealogy nerds who goes to cemeteries, searches for deceased family members, and makes rubbings of tombstones.  It seemed a bit ghoulish, and unnecessary considering the amount of information you can access online about ancestors. But last Friday, my husband and I went to a Catholic cemetery in Los Angeles where many of his family members are buried.  We were searching for dates for several people whose records we could not acess online. 

Like so many cemeteries, this one was beautiful.  It was a lovely day, the grass was green, the sky blue, and the rolling hills of the cemetery quite peaceful.  We had to stop in the office first, and it took some time to access the names we were searching for - they were not digitized, so an employee had to go back and search in some old books.  We found most of the people we were looking for, and were able to read the headstones  to get the dates.  In other words, we didn't have to do  rubbings in order to read them.  I was happy about that - I would have felt silly. 

While there, we stopped by the graves of my husband's grandparents, Anthony and Madalena.  They had changed their surname many years ago from Eterovich to Terich.  We were surprised to see, however, that their headstones were inscribed with the original Croatian name.

Before we left, we placed some flowers on a few of the graves, and spent a few moments reflecting on the people whose graves we visited - all immigrants from Croatia - and on their lives, their courage, their fortitude and their legacies.  



A Marathon, not a Sprint

It's been an eventful few days.  I had ten copies of my mother-in-law's family history book printed to distribute to relatives.  This one I did myself on word and inserted all the photographs, then took it to Fed Ex Office and had them print it double-sided and then bind it.  It isn't as good as a professionally printed book, but since we only needed a few copies, it worked just fine.  As long as everyone treats it carefully, it can last a long time. 

I also sent off the Eterovic book to the book designer, finally!  I had thought it would be ready to print by now, but the book project snowballed and as we met more and more cousins, we were referred to more and more relatives who had information we wanted to include. So things were delayed a bit.  Now it will be a matter of phone calls and emails between me and the designer to get the book to look exactly as we want it to.  In the meantime, my daughter in law is designing the cover.  The next step, about six weeks from now, will be to send everything to the printer, and by late June or early July, we should have the book. 

So with those books completed, I had to choose my next project.  And with our upcoming trip to Ireland, I decided to start with the Irish research.  Almost a year ago, I paid for a preliminary search by a genealogy firm in Ireland.  They found some promising areas to research and I just hired them to continue and see if they can find anything else in the records.  Ireland's records are very spotty, most of the census records from the 1800s having been destroyed intentionally or unintentionally, so I don't know how much we may find, but at least I'll know if we've reached a dead end or not.  The history I have only begins with my 2nd great grandparents, Ned and Mary Brennan, who came to America in 1861.  Before that, I have only names, and even those I'm unsure of.  So we'll see. 

I also want to research my paternal grandmother's family - the Shaw family and their ancestors.  There is a possible connection to the early American colonies and I need to confirm two generations with very few sources available to me.  I have recently sent for a book on the Bland family - one crucial line - and have been searching through it for clues, but I may have to go to source records in Ohio and other states.  That will mean some interesting travel and I'm up for that. 

A researcher in the Czech Republic once told me genealogy is not a sprint, it's a marathon, and I now understand what he means.  I have much more to learn and discover about my side of the family, and even with my husband's family history books complete, there is still more to discover about his family.  So, after a short break to relax and recover from the last two projects, I'll be back in the archives, learning what I can about the people who made it possible for me to even be here.

The Yeseta Family, Together Again

I finally have in my possession pictures of all of the Yeseta siblings - the brothers and sisters of my husband's paternal grandmother, Madalena.  The original spellling of the name was Ješeta, but in Croatian the letter J is pronounced Y so in the United States, the family changed the spelling. (The name Ješeta is actually a Czech name, the siblings' father having been born in Bohemia - the modern day Czech Republic.)

There were six siblings, all of whom came to the United States.  Their names were Maria, Anna, Matej (Matthew), Sime (pronounced Shima), Ante (Anthony) and Madalena.  Now that I have their pictures, I can send the manuscript of the family history book to my book designer.  She will need to do some photoshop repair work on some of the pictures.  Here they are:

Maria

                                                                               Anna

Matej

Sime

Ante

Madalena

These siblings were born between 1875 and 1886. Four of the six died between 1929 and 1939, at relatively young ages, from pneumonia or accidents.  All of them married and have many descendants. Some of the descendants have kept in touch with other descendants, but in many cases relatives had lost track of each other. This project has brought many of them together again, in small gatherings, and through email and phone calls. This was a bonus outcome I had not anticipated - the reunion of grandchildren and great grandchildren of the orignial Yeseta immigrants. Many of those grandchildren  had never even met the grandparents who died so young.

Besides these pictures of the siblings, I have wedding pictures of the two brothers, other group pictures, and the names of most of the descendants as well as ancestors dating back to the early 1700s.  All will be sent off next Monday to the designer.  In about 2 months, we should have the finished product and the Yesetas will once again be united, if only in a book.