Welcome to my genealogy blog. Ancestors I Wish I Knew is a combination of genealogical information and stories about individuals in my family tree. The focus is on those from my Cochrane, Eitelbach, Merrett, Minarcik and Richards lines and their descendants.

Monday, February 13, 2017

#100--Will You Be My Valentine?



While I was thinking about a Valentine Day blog, I thought I would do one on my postcards.  Then I remembered that I did that last year.  However, and fortunately for me, I had some vintage Valentine Day cards.  So that is the focus of this blog entry.

I had some idea that Valentine postcards evolved into cards and that is indeed true. In 1913, Hallmark sold its first Valentine card.  We do not know how many were sent then, but today about 150 million Valentine Day cards are sent—only at Christmas are more cards exchanged. Who gets the most?—teachers, then children, mothers, wives, sweethearts, and then pets. (I loved my dogs dearly, but it never occurred to me to send them a card!).

So here are a couple of the cards that I have.

  This one was sent to me by my father.  Given the hairstyle on the girl, I think it was sent in the 1960's. In line with the jewelry theme, inside it says: " In words of one syllable, you are a pearl."


 I am no exception to teachers getting Valentine cards, here is one that I got from one of my Sunday School students.  Its small size with the message on the front makes it look like the ones we see today.















Now I have always been a big fan of the Peanuts cartoons so
it should be no surprise that I would have a Peanuts Valentine card.  When it is opened, you find out that Lucy is making that Valentine out of Linus's beloved blanket!



                                                                                                                 






















I do not have a Pinterest Board of vintage card, but I do have one on Valentine postcards.  If you are interested, you can find it here:  Valentine Postcards.  Also on the right side of this blog, you can find my blog from last year on Valentine Postcards.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

#99 Organizing the Minarciks, Eitelbachs, Hannah, and Richards—A Follow-Up



It has been an incredibly busy January and somehow this blog was put on the back burner. I did, however, think about my genealogy goals for last year. One of those goals was to organize all the documents that I have for my various lines. As I previously blogged, I decided that the best way for me to do that was to use the loose leaf notebook method. Each line has its own color-coded notebook, which is divided into sections for each person. The first document in each notebook is a chart that contains the ancestors who are in the notebook. After some experimentation, I decided to start with the most recent ancestor and work my way back.

So how did I do?  Pretty well.  My four main direct lines—Minarcik, Eitelbach, Hannah, and Richards were completed.  I now have birth, marriage and death information for each person along with other information that is unique to that person, e.g. pension records, land records, etc. A great deal of what I had was online so I did a lot of printing.  I also had to do some searching as I discovered that I was missing some of the information I wanted for some people.  Each document is in its own clear plastic holder.

Having gotten those lines done, I then turned to the collateral lines:  I completed the Cochrane line and most of the Mears.  I am now working the Newells.

This procedure was not with some problems.  One of the problems that I ran into while looking for a particular record was getting distracted and going off in another direction.  I found some interesting information while doing that, but it certainly did slow the process down.  Another problem was ending up reading all the information I had.  That was a plus and a minus.  I learned more, but got slowed down.

So what is up for this year?  I want to get the rest of the lines organized.  I also have a very, very large number of pictures.  I want to go through them and decide which ones to keep, which ones to scan, and which to discard. Tune in next year and see how I did.