Mountain View Cemetery

Recently my father and stepmother decided to pay a visit to Mountain View Cemetery, near Casa Grande, Arizona.  They have shared photos they took of a few of the incredible memorials they found there.  I was awestruck by how personalized some of these burial sites are, and how strikingly different they are from the cemeteries I’ve visited.  I would love to see this cemetery personally.




Above: An overview of one section of the cemetery – the mounds are interesting, and quite a contrast to another section, below:

And still another section:

In looking at the cemetery photos, the incredible personalization of the burial sites was very touching.

More photos of some of the other unique graves to come ~

And we lived to tell about it...

I was just transcribing one of my great-grandmother’s diaries, telling of their trip to the Oahe Dam in South Dakota.  The year was 1956; they all piled into my Uncle Ray’s station wagon: Grandma and Grandpa, their two daughters and sons-in-law, and 6 kids on a mattress in the back of the wagon.

Reading this, I could almost feel my brother’s elbows in my ribs, and getting squashed by a gaggle of cousins on any of the road trips we took under similar conditions.  Sometimes there were so many kids piled in the backseat that we really weren’t sure whose foot that was...  and to make things even more exciting, there were oftentimes a dog or two in the mix.

Sometimes we’d pile into the back of my dad’s yellow pickup truck for a ride; I can still feel the wind whipping my hair around violently like it was just yesterday.  It was so exhilarating...

Awhile back in our local paper, there was an article about winter safety, and they mentioned that pulling sleds with vehicles wasn’t safe.  Even with a long rope, out in the middle of a field?  No!!  I felt a pain through my very heart!  Again, another portion of my beloved childhood memories were relegated to the Hall of Shame.

I’m not saying any of this is good, or bad, just that it’s different.  Times change.  The world changes.  Are we better off?  I don’t know.  Did the parents of the 1950s look back at past generations and think them nonchalant where safety was concerned?  I wonder.  I know only one thing ... that I won’t be telling my grandchildren about the time we ... never mind.


Image courtesy of office.com

Future Friday – Photo Albums with a Twist, Part II

Last month I began a project to bring life to our family photos, and to make them meaningful to future generations.  At the time of my previous post, my mother and I had sat down with a photo album, a digital audio recorder, and, of course, her memories and stories.  We now have completed the project for this album, and I wanted to share our experience.
TRANSCRIBING
After recording our conversation, I transcribed it as closely as possible.  This was probably the most difficult part of the project, but I discovered some simple tactics that made it easier.  After transferring the audio file from the recorder to my computer, I used a media player to play it back, and transcribed it into a template I’d made in my word processing program.  I used different colored text for each person, to make the conversation easier to follow.  I could transcribe one person’s sentence, pause the recording, then simply move my cursor to the next line, and the text would automatically change color.

One of the helpful features of the media player I used was the timeclock feature.  Since this was a labor-intensive job, I did it in small bits, and by noting the clock reading (in green) I could easily pick up where I left off, or find this place in the recording if I needed to in the future.

SCANNING
After the transcribing was done, I scanned the pages of the photo album, in order, using numeric filenames (01, 02, etc).  I scanned at 400 dpi, and saved the files as .tif. 
PROCESSING
When the scanning was complete, I went back to the first scan and worked page by page.  I first re-read the transcription pertaining to that page to “refamiliarize” myself with the details.  Using Irfanview to process the photos (I have no connection to this company, just like their software), I cropped each one and resized it to a manageable size, but still large enough to show detail clearly, and saved a copy as a .jpg.  These smaller versions would be incorporated into an online photo album, while keeping the original, larger scans as they were.
Again using Irfanview, I added extra “canvas” to the bottom of each photo, where I could add text.  I added the year (or an estimation), identified the people in the photo, and added any stories or pertinent details.

ORGANIZING

When I saved these .jpg copies, I used a particular formula for the filename:

1950_museum_93.jpg

1950 represents the year (if I didn’t know it, I’d estimate and use “1950Abt”) to keep the files in somewhat of a chronological order.  The middle part pertains to the subject.  If I had several photos of the same subject, I used, for instance, “museum1”, “museum2”, etc. to keep similar photos together when sorted by filename.  The last number refers to the original scan number, in case I wanted to locate the high-resolution version of this picture in the future.

THE FINISHED PRODUCT

Once I had this completed, I created a PhotoBucket account and uploaded the .jpgs.  Again, I have no connection to this particular company.  I use it because their free account offers a lot of space, the ability to set up multiple photo albums in one account, and offers a “guest” password so other family members can access the photos while still keeping them private from the general public.  One of the options I could chose was to sort the photos by filename, and because of the particular nomenclature I described above, the photos are in reasonable chronological order, with photos of similar occasions together, with very little effort.

All in all, this is a big project, but priceless for our descendants.  I want to bring life, interest and, in a sense, immortality to the people in these photos, who might otherwise have ended up as a bunch of smiling strangers on the page of an album.  We have many more albums to “enhance”, but I believe this is one of the best investments we’ll ever make.

Forebear Friday – Herb Ulmer

Herb Ulmer was both the quintessential cowboy and a dapper gentleman.  Born in 1915 along the rolling hills of the Missouri River valley in South Dakota, he moved with his family to the middle of the state at a very early age.  His parents, Christian and Katherina Ulmer, settled in Ree Heights, among the gently rolling hills, where they farmed.  Herb was ninth in a family of ten children. His father died when Herb was just six, and three years later, his mother married Christian Rosenau.
Herb earned his high school diploma in 1932 at Ree Heights and married Jessie Ball seven years later.  In the following years he owned a dance hall at St. Peter, Minnesota, and after coming back to Ree Heights, owned a billiards establishment.  But horses were his passion.

Herb traveled the rodeo circuit throughout the United States, riding in roping events, bringing home numerous trophies and buckles.  In 1964, he won the South Dakota State Barrel Racing Championship with “Rusty Habit”, pictured at right with Herb’s wife Jessie.  After retiring from the rodeo circuit, he started a horse breeding operation at Ree Heights, and raced his horses throughout the midwest.  He continued the remainder of his career as a winner, both at the horse races and as a breeder, turning out many future champions.
His wife Jessie was killed in a car accident in 1971, and Herb continued alone at their ranch for the next two years, until he married my widowed mother-in-law, Louise, and became a vital part of the family.   While he had no biological children, he took on the role of father, and eventually grandfather, with a tremendous amount of patience and enthusiasm.  Everyone loved him, and with good reason.  Herb passed away in 1996.  We’ll see him again someday.  Until then, we’ll treasure the memories.

Forebear Friday – Ella Monsen Christensen

Gabriella Alfhilde Monsen looks like just a wisp of a girl, but she must have been tough.  Born in Bergen, Norway in 1884, Ella was the daughter of Gabriel Monsen and his wife Alvilda Marie Olsen.  Her father, a fisherman by trade, was caught in a violent storm off the coast of Norway when Ella was about 7, and vanished.  After the death of her father, the family lived in a small apartment in Bergen, her mother taking in washing to put food on the table.  By the time Ella was 16, she was helping to support her family by working as a domestic servant. 

In April of 1904, at the age of 20, Ella boarded a ship destined for the United States, to the home of her paternal aunt Ingeborg Rye in South Dakota. She would never return to her home country again.  It was at Aunt Ingeborg's that Ella learned English, and then again forged out on her own, probably taking a job as a domestic servant in Huron, about 60 miles away.  In the next five years, her brother and sister also left Norway.  Alvilda did not join her children here until 1915.

Ella married Peter C. Christensen, a Danish immigrant who owned Bell Bakery, in May of 1911.  They also spent time farming in rural Beadle County.  She was a farm wife who raised five children – Lillian, Raymond, Clarence, Edna and Sylvia, and later helped to raise Lillian’s children, who lived on a farm just down the road.  Her granddaughter Betty has some very fond memories of her, and what a fun grandmother she was. She was nice to everyone, but she was also stern.

In 1947, they sold their farm in Beadle county and left behind the hard work and brutal winters.   They retired to a lovely home with a park-like corner lot in Gardena, California, where they enjoyed fruit trees and a koi pond.  Their children Clarence and Sylvia married and raised families there as well.  She was just 67 when she died at her home of heart failure five years later.  She is buried at Roosevelt Memorial Park Cemetery.

Forebear Friday – Abial Adams

 

Above: Abial Abbott Adams and his wife, Irene Gray

My first post for Forebear Friday highlights Abial Abbott Adams.  How can you not love facial hair like this? 

Abial Adams was born about 1802 in Newport, Orleans co., Vermont, said by some to be the first white child born within the present limits of that town.  He was the son of Revolutionary War patriot Martin Adams and his wife, Mercy Ryder Adams.
He married Irene Gray about 1825, and they appear to have spent their lives in Newport, appearing there in each census from 1830 through 1870.  He supported his family by farming, and he also owned a sawmill.
Abial and Irene were the parents of 15 children: Ira, David, Daniel, Lucretia, James, John, Abel, Oscar, Mercy, Newell, Orin, Harriet, Donald, Ransom, and Frank.
It is unclear exactly when Abial died, some time between 1879 and 1881.  I could locate neither Abial nor his wife in the 1880 census.  She died 01 Apr 1885 in Newport.  Both are buried in Lake Road Cemetery in Newport.

Future Friday – Photo Albums with a Twist

Thanks go out to Jenn at Your Growing Tree for the idea of Future Friday.  The idea is to get us thinking about helping future generations to know *us*. A few weeks ago I set a goal for 2011: to create biographies and record family stories of the more “recent” generations of our family. 
My first project will be to “enhance” our family’s photo albums.  As a finished product, I envision scanned photos of ample size for easy viewing of details.  Each photo will have all persons and places identified, as completely as possible, with any background stories or interesting tidbits included. 
I planned to attack this project by sitting down with my mother, a photo album, and a digital voice recorder.  Together, we will go through the albums and reminisce, capturing our conversation on the recorder.  Thanks to the recorder, we should be able to concentrate more on telling the stories and less on the business of preserving the stories.
To prepare, I dug out my RCA Digital Voice Recorder, which I had not used in 2 years, and re-familiarized myself with its operation.  I then gave it fresh batteries, and started testing various settings and recorder placement to ensure a good finished product, easy to hear and understand, since we have only one shot at this with any sort of spontaneity.
We got comfortable at the dining room table, with the recorder, a photo album, and a notebook and pen, just in case we needed to write something down, although the idea was to be less structured and more conversational.  It took very little time to forget that the recorder was on, although I did try to note every time we turned the page, and give a quick, descriptive comment on the first photo on the page, as a “landmark” I can use when matching the conversation to the correct photos. 
It took us about an hour and a half to go through the album, and we had a great time.  I learned more about our family’s activities and chronology than I could have hoped for.  These were all things that my mom had not thought to mention, and I never knew to ask.  And best of all, I wasn’t desperately trying to write all of this down, or remember it correctly; the recorder was taking care of that for me.
The next step will be scanning the album pages, in order, and in a large enough size to make the faces and details easily seen.  I am still considering how to organize these photos.  Currently, I have my old digitized photos organized into folders by year, and within the folders, by file name – not exactly ideal for my purposes now.  I had considered looking for photo album software, but would prefer something in a more universal format for sharing and backing up.  I am looking into the various online photo storage sites.
I will then transcribe our recorded conversation and comments verbatim.  I’m still working on exactly how I’m going to put the comments and stories together with the photos, but will likely extract facts from the transcription, and enhance the pages of photos with them.
I’ll keep you posted!