From this weekends visit with friends I brought back slides to try out in my new VuPoint slide scanner  that I had mentioned previously on April 26, 2008. I had only tested it out with negatives and it seemed to work relatively well.

 

From yesterday’s messing around I did find a few things that could be a bit bothersome. The slide scanner can be a bit slow in resetting itself. The instructions say to wait 5 seconds in between each capture. Once loading the scanner, at first I was waiting for the slide to completely load and the image to stop changing. This was creating some very bleached out images. I looked for a place to adjust the setting and didn’t find one, I even searched through the small amount of documentation that was included. When I looked closer at the preview image that appears on the screen as it is being scanned, I realized that it was giving me different exposures to choose from. I ended up rescanning some images that I thought weren’t going to display anything at all. Occasionally you had to be quick about capturing the correct exposure or you would end up with a washed out version.

 

The slide holder holds 3 separate slides. I found if the slides were at opposite ends of the exposure scale the scanner would do well on one and bleach the other out. I tried two different methods to correct this problem. One is to place only two slides in the holder leaving the middle one empty to give the scanner a chance to readjust and the other was to empty the scanner completely and only do one slide at a time, giving the scanner plenty of time to readjust its settings.

 

Some were a bit tricky and I had to load them into the scanner several times to get the correct exposure. Overall with the learning curve I scanned in over 100 slides in about 5 hours. This included taking the slides out of their metal cases, another bit of a hassle, but would have needed done regardless of the scanner I had purchased.

It was no secret in the family that my great grandfather Van Houtte was a miserable man. There is a story that is told about a door that needed to be put on the family home. Although he would bring a bag of candy home for the children on pay day he never bought things that were needed for the house. The door was ordered and it came in, just as they do now without hinges or a lock. My Great grandmother, Clemence Mary, got a neighbor to hang the door with old hinges and purchased a lock set at the lock hardware store. They had been keeping the door shut with a nail. My great grandfather, Emil Victor, asked how much the lock set cost and decided it was too much and took it off the door and took it back.

 

A month later Emil went into town and bought another lock set that he claimed was the same price as the one that he had taken off of the door. All of this happened before 1920. Much to my surprise I found 2 articles on newspaperarchive.com that helped support the story of Emil’s temper and started gossip about Clemence.

McKean County Miner, June 19, 1919

 

Beefsteak and the Boarder

 

Sheriff E. W. Jones and Deputy Sheriff, C. C. Choate served as members of a Belgian relief committee Sunday, when they were called to Mt. Alton to straighten out the marital as well as martial troubles of one Victor Van Houtte, a Belgian.

 

Their findings were as follows: Victor works in a chemical plant at Newton. His wife keeps the family home at Mt. Alton and also a border. Victor usually spends the weekend in the bosom of his family and upon arriving on one such occasion recently found the boarder in his wife’s bedroom. With commendable fortitude he passed up this irregularity, but the following morning when the “missus” fed him bread and black coffee and produced delicious beefsteak for the boarder he decided he had a real grievance and chided his wife rather sternly.

 

However, open hostilities did not result until last Sunday when his wife criticized his methods of gardening while he was hoeing in the truck patch with the sweat of honest toil dripping from his brow. This was too much and the long suffering husband pursued his wife and threatened her with the hoe. She escaped and sought the protection of the strong arm of the law. The relief commission responded and after hearing both sides of the case impressed upon the belligerents the beauties of peace and strongly advised them to avoid strife in the future and from outward indications succeeded in patching up the difficulties.

A week after the publication of their fight another article appeared in the Mckean County Miner:

McKean County Miner, June 26, 1919

 

Van Houtte Was Arrested

 

Upon a surety of the peace warrant Victor Van Houtte, who is employed in the chemical plant at Newton, was brought before Justice Gleason by Constable Dickinson, Saturday and after a hearing held under $300 bail for his appearance at court. His wife was the complainant in the case and claims that her husband threatened her with a garden rake and double-bitted axe and that his general conduct has become unbearable.  Mrs. Van Houtte is described as an entirely respectable hard-working woman, the mother of four intelligent children, three of whom appeared at the hearing and testified in their mother’s behalf. The husband appears to be insanely jealous without apparent reason. Van Houtte secured bail some hours after the hearing and was released from custody but must face the charge at the next term of court.

By the time the Census was taken in 1920 Clemence was living in Bradford with her children and Emil was still living in Lafayette.

I have wondered for some time if purchasing a membership with newspaperarchive.com would be valuable to me. I wondered if there was going to be different newspaper articles available from what was posted on ancestry.com. To my surprise it has turned out to be very valuable.

 

My paternal great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Burgess, was in the Civil War and was at one point in time one of only seven survivors. I found many articles on newspaperarchive.com with mention of him in it, including his obituary, which did not mention his deceased wife at all. I knew that her first name was Mary and that she was alive up until 1920 but that was about all I knew about her.

 

I started reading every article with the mention of B.F. Burgess in it. For once the tendency in the late 1800s and early 1900s to post everything about every move made by residents in the newspaper was about to pay off. I found this article:

 

Olean Evening Herald, June 22, 1920

 

Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Burgess and family of Olean visited at the home of Mrs. Burgess’ brother, John Donigan, Sunday.

 

I now knew her maiden name and was about to discover a whole lot more. I kept reading the society articles and found not only that she had a brother named John but had one name Thomas also. It was at this point I was about to be confused. One of the articles mentioned siblings named “O’Keefe.”

 

I had been searching the census records in the Olean area to find the Donigan family that would have a Mary, John and Thomas, pretty common names for an Irish family. It all became clear when I found Mary’s brothers living in the Olean area as step children of Patrick O’Keefe. Mary’s mother, Mary, had remarried after her first husband, James Donigan’s death about 1860 – 1865. I found 6 children from the marriage of James Donigan and Mary and another 2 children from her marriage to Patrick O’Keefe.

 

Of course since I have solved the problem of Mary Donigan, I have now created more problems, like the names of James Donigan’s parents and Mary’s mother’s maiden name and then her parents and then…. It never ends.

 

This is Dad's army photo. On the back of the photo, signed by each of the members of the photo are the names of each soldier. My uncle, my mother's brother, is in the front row. This is before mom and dad were married.

 

Photo –

Front row Left to Right –

Russ Duint, Erie, PA, Norbert Walkiewicy, Erie, PA, James E Hollenbeck, Erie, PA, George Hamilton, Erie, PA, Sargent Roebuck, Dale West, Bradford, PA, Dub Strohmeyer, Erie PA, Fred Bubl Jr., Erie, PA, Eugene Walker, Hazel Hurst, PA

Second row –

Herbert Schmalenbach, Erie, PA, Jack Sherman, Steve Frolch, Erie, PA, John Heintz, Erie, PA, Dick Van Houtte, Bradford, PA, Deek Taylor, Bob Schwab, Duke Center, PA

Third row –

Darurn Turner, Eldred, PA, Ray Fronchnett, Erie, PA, George Hoetzl, Erie, PA, Charles Swartz, Mt Alton, PA, Chet Chojnathi, 120  41^st, Erie, PA, Philip L. Smith, Eldred, PA

Back row –

Len McLaughlin, Erie, PA, Bruce Sherwin, Bradford, PA, Clarence S. Lube, Erie, PA

It took reordering blotter paper three times before I was finally able to try flattening out my dad’s army group photos. The smaller of the two photos has the names of the soldiers in the photo on the back.

 

I got a Tupperware container out because of the tight seal, and found a smaller plastic container that would hold water to place inside. I added warm water to the small bowl and set it inside the Tupperware with the 2 separate rolled up photos and waited. I checked them every couple of hours and could feel the paper backing starting to become less brittle.

 

After about six hours I found I could unroll the photos without them wanting to bend. I folded the blotter paper in half to make a folder and carefully inserted the photos into the homemade folder. I grabbed some heavy books to help flatten out the photos and I now have them resting on the counter.

 

Tomorrow I should be able to scan them in and share them.

I decided that I needed a better way to organize my photos if I am going to be scanning in gazillions of old slides. I want to be able to identify them by the people that are in them, date or holiday and the place they were taken. The file name just isn’t long enough to get the needed detail.

 

I did a bit of searching and found CyPics, Photo Album Software, v3.6. After downloading the trial software I copied a selection of photos into a separate file and started playing with the setup. It claims to be easy to learn, but there are a lot of steps and knowing a bit about data base set up helps, a lot. It builds an Access data base in the background and with the tool you are entering information into the tables allowing searching and sorting.

 

All of this required a very deep breath before plunging in. I have played with Access a couple of years ago, I was at that time determined to figure it out. My first try had been a success and then it was all down hill after that. There is a tutorial workbook with CyPics that helps step you along and explains at a high level what the data base verbiage means. You can get as detailed or as simple as you choose. I am currently still struggling with the difference between Keywords and Attributes and what each will do for me when completed.

 

I have a 30 day trial to get use to the application and decide if it is what I will use for the new files I will be loading. I am considering trying it out with the family files I already have. From what I have learned so far you can create CD and DVD slide shows, pdf color sheets organized with selected information and can email photos with captions. I played with the pdf version of a photo book and was happy with the results.

Like many families, off in some corner, crammed in boxes, are hundreds of little celluloid family slides. I can vividly remember talking dad into watching slides for hours on weekend evenings.

 

After much labor of putting up the screen, clearing a table to prop the camera on and then fishing through slides one at a time to display, up would pop old memories. The photos even then always seemed a bit yellow splashed on that white flimsy screen. It was fun.

 

Every trip home to Pennsylvania I have looked at the boxes of slides my grandfather and father had taken packed onto a shelf in my old bedroom and wondered what in the world we would do with them, until the other day. My Bed, Bath and Beyond flyer showed up and in it was this VuPoint slide scanner for $99.99. BB&B are great at sending out 20% off coupons at regular intervals and sure enough I had one that was still good. I did a bit of research and found really mixed reviews on the product. There were a lot of complaints about the scanner software and some concerning the quality of the scan. Some people raved about it and the cost savings. The one thing that I did find mentioned was that the drivers were compatible with my Adobe Photoshop program. I figured I could do color correction in the program if they scanned in that bad. For $80 it would get those memories stored safely, even if they weren’t professionally done at a much greater expense.

 

We ran out and bought one. I figured I had a full evening ahead of me with fighting to get it to work. I opened the box and looked in the documentation for installation directions to use with Photoshop and didn’t see them. I slipped the dvd in to load the drivers. The menu was set up so that you loaded the drivers and the scan software separately. I loaded the drivers and then plugged in the device. Windows recognized it as a new device and started looking for the drivers; I pointed the wizard at the installation dvd. Once that was complete I started my Photoshop program and went to file > Import and found the VuPoint Scanner listed. I couldn’t find any slides lying around so I inserted a negative strip. The image displayed, I copied it and then copied another after pushing the slide through to the next section in the strip.

 

It copies the negatives, as negative, so the next step was to select Image > Adjustments > Invert in Photoshop, for the positive version. I was pleasantly surprised how well they turned out. Some needed more color correction than others, but I think that was how it would have been originally.

 

To speed things up once I get the slides in August I ordered another set of slide and negative holders, which should make the scanning go a lot faster. I am planning on developing a quick slide show for the family reunion in Pennsylvania in August. With mom’s help and dad’s old slides I think we can create a quick digital display of old photos to run on my laptop. I am anxious to see what ancestors are hidden in all of those old boxes of slides.

 

 

I decided to dig through the only Bradford High School Yearbook, The Barker, 1934, that is published on ancestry.com. I flipped through the pages of graduates looking for any member that may have been in my direct line or one of its many branches. After passing the last listed graduate photo and moving on through the accomplishments and legacies of all of its’ members I was getting a bit tired and thinking of giving up when I got to the page on the class trip.

 

Twelve years following my grandmothers’ trip to Washington, DC it seems the senior class was following the same route. What caught my eye was the paragraph stating:

 

“On Monday morning we boarded our buses and left for Mount Vernon where we visited the estate, mansion and tomb of Martha and George Washington. While in Mount Vernon the entire party posed for a group picture.”

 

I did a quick search for images of Mount Vernon. I finally found out what building was in the background of my grandmothers’ graduation trip photo – Mount Vernon.  The photo was taken on the back lawn of the estate, the front of the building did not have the long white pillars.

 

The mansion was erected in 1741-42, is made of wood and located on the banks of the Potomac River. The plantation would remain in the hands of a Washington descendant until 1858 when the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union would acquire the building and a portion of the land rescuing it from neglect. During the Civil War the estate was a neutral ground for both sides. Mount Vernon was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

The one thing that I have a lot of in my data base is the Thomas Burgess of Barnstable, Massachusetts Line on my father’s side of the family. While searching on a Richard Burgess that was said to have died in the Florida War in the early 1800s I stumbled across this page that was verified by DNA. One of the things that was noted on this web site is the number of Burgess’s that could possibly have been related to my Thomas Burgess of Barnstable, Massachusetts line. From their account Thomas Burgess of Barnstable Co., Massachusetts, of Josiah Burgess of Monroe Co., New York, and of Thomas Burgess of York Co., Ontario, Canada have a common relative somewhere in the line.

 

They have connected several other Burgess lines through this project:

 

• Albert Burgess, born about 1811 in Massachusetts of Tolland County, Connecticut
• Thomas Burgess of York County Ontario
• Josiah Burgess, born about 1785 possibly in Connecticut, of Monroe County, New York

 

It is fascinating how it can be determined through DNA different branches of your family. We have watched the 2006 PBS program on DVD of African American Lives. It shows how they can track a direct line of your ancestors this way.

I decided to focus on my great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Burgess, born Jan 9, 1845 in Thompkins, New York. I have his wife's first name as Mary but do not have her maiden name. I decided to order his Civil War Pension information for more detail on him. I carefully filled out the form and hit submit. An error message informed me that the Archives only held up to 1929 and because my grandfather had died in 1932 his documentation would be held at the VA.

 

I entered the URL that was provided and started digging. Reading the information I figured I was among the minority of people that would be requesting assistance. Most of the users would be looking for information for themselves, not a long deceased ancestor. Without a clear direct path, other than it seems that I will have to send via snail mail for information, I entered information into their request system for insturctions. The form asked for a good bit of information. I filled it all out, read the warning to only hit submit ONCE, that it could take upwards of 25 seconds to clear, and hit submit. I waited and waited and opened another browser window to continue on a different website. I returned and looked at the page still grinding away several times. Minutes later I noticed that I had recieved a timeout on the page.

 

I was a bit frustrated and decided to make my request at another time.

In the process of writing this blog I have, many times helped myself to review my findings and turn up lost avenues to search. It didn’t work that way for the blog I had written about George just the other day. What it did do was give Terry Snyder from Desktop Genealogist, enough facts to go on to do a search. Terry didn’t have the family buzzing in her ear with misinformation that mislead. I was so focused on what I was hearing and what couldn’t be true to see the forest for the trees.

 

Terry did a bit of searching on Albert, son of George and Nancy Catherine “Katie”. She found his death record which had Missouri as his birth state. I had it as Tennessee, thanks to the infernal buzzing in my ear. With that she went looking for George and Katie’s wedding certificate. Missouri has a wealth of information posted on births, deaths and marriages. Sure enough she found the certificate in Stoddard county Missouri, with a matching date to the one that was written in a family bible that a relative has. G. W. Click had married a C. N. Yates.

 

She went looking for George in the Census and without tunnel vision she found the family in Kentucky in 1850 and then right across the Kentucky/Missouri line in Stoddard county, Missouri in 1860 without George. She didn’t find them in 1870, although I did later and with George in the household. The transcriber had read the original image as “Slick” instead of “Click”.

 

She mentioned other individuals in the family that also had marriage certificates listed. With all of this information I dug in. Researching on the siblings of George I found them in Puxico and Duck Creek Stoddard county, Missouri, where I had been told that Albert went to visit relatives in the boot heel. Exactly where the family had landed and then spread out. Some would eventually move into Arkansas and others down into Texas.

 

A very big thanks goes out Terry!! Now I am stuck with Michael Click in 1814, could he possibly be related to the Baltas Cleek family…..

George W Click has turned into a major block for me. He is on a tree that belongs to a friend of mine that I have been working on. What I know about George is relatively vague.

 

George was born in Tennessee, his exact location unknown, on May 18, 1840. He would marry Nancy Catherine Yates on October 9, 1872 in yet again another unknown location. What I know about Nancy Catherine Yates is that her family came from Tennessee and she was born there in 1848. Nancy moved from Dickson County, Tennessee after the 1850 Census and ended up in Center Township, Dade County, Missouri. In 1880 she would be found in Hutton Valley Township, Howell County, Missouri.

 

You would think that the 1870 Census would give me some sort of clue as to where George might be if I could find Nancy in the Census, and I can’t. There are several George Clicks living during that period. One of which I have completely ruled out because he was still living and married after the noted death date I have for George. From what I have been told by a relative with the family bible is that George died September 8, 1877, location unknown.

 

I sent to the National Archive for information on George’s service record. I sent them everything I knew about his marriage so that they would be sure to send me the correct George. According to the records George served in the Confederate army, in Tennessee. At one point he was wounded. I figured if he died in 1877 that there was a good chance I might find a widows pension for Nancy and her son Albert, who was born July 26, 1873 in Tennessee.

 

The National Archives wouldn’t take the application because Confederate pensions were handled by the southern state that the soldier was living in. My best guess for Nancy would have been either Tennessee or Missouri. On further investigation I found stated that the Confederate pensions were very few and a person had to be completely incapacitated to receive one.  I haven’t found out yet if there were widow and children pensions for them to draw on.

 

I am not sure how Nancy and George met. She would have had to have come back to Tennessee from Missouri at some point to meet George. Her family either stayed in the Hickman county area of Tennessee or moved into Dade county Missouri. From Census records Albert, her son was born in Tennessee in 1872, placing her back in Tennessee at that point.

 

I am really at a loss where to go from here to find the correct George.

 

I remember growing up and occasionally hearing mention of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood. Pennsylvania is known for its floods and other relatives would survive the Austin, Pennsylvania flood 30 years later. The residents of Johnstown were use to water filling the streets, the town being built in the river valley. It was common a couple of times a year to move belongings to a safer place in your home to avoid their soaking when snow would melt rapidly in the spring.

 

The flood had devastated Johnstown and all of the residential areas between it and the dam. It would take almost an hour from the break of the dam on May 31, 1889 until it would hit the town around 4 p.m. that day. Heavy rains at 11 a.m. would threaten the dam and by 11:30 a.m. engineers were predicting that the dam may fail.

 

At 3:10 p.m. the bridge failed. South Fork would loose 20 to 30 homes and the first 4 victims would die. Thirty people lived on the main street at Mineral Springs, a mile below the viaduct. Bare rock would be the only thing left after the water passed and sixteen people would die at 3:30.

 

John Hess would race his train and lock the whistle down to blow warning to residents from Buttermilk Falls to East Conemaugh. His act would save many lives but still 50 would die, including 25 from the train. At 4:05 the flood water would divide into 3 waves hitting Westmont Hill and flooding Kernville.

 

The water would gain speed and claim 314 of the 1,000 residents of Woodvale. Twelve miles from its start, carrying the remains of buildings and bodies the waters with its disaster would hit Johnstown at 4:07 p.m. The wave would split again for the last time. The debris would pile up at the stone bridge causing water to back up 30 feet in Johnstown until breaking through and flooding Cambria. The debris piled against the stone bridge would catch fire at 6 p.m., claiming 80 more lives and burning for 2 days.

 

When the waters finally stopped and the count of the dead totaled 2,209, bodies would be found as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio. Included in the count was my 3^rd cousin 4 times removed, William Alexander Kilgore and his entire family, wife Annie “Lizzie” Cope, daughter Jessie, 15 years old, sons Fred and Alex, ages 12 and 9 respectively. They lived at 327 Washington Street in Johnstown. Washington Street ran along the edge of the river that would flood with water and debris. Mr. William F Lewis would give eye witness account of the destruction of the Kilgore’s house.

“In about twenty-five minutes after, he (Mr. Lewis) was down at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot and saw the avalanche of water coming on the town. He saw the steeple of the German Lutheran church fall, then Mr. Kilgore’s residence, and after that the Assistance engine-house. He noticed that the houses on Iron Street rose bodily and began to twist and grind one another to pieces; and after that everything changed as in a kaleidoscope…”

According to morgue records Alexander’s body was found before the 10^th of June and held in morgue C, the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot, as number 168. On the 10^th of June the morgue was moved to Millville in the First Ward School House. The remaining bodies were never found.

 

William Alexander was a clerk in the Cambria county office. He had grown up in the Westmoreland county area the oldest of four children of David and Emily Kincaid Kilgore. His youngest brother John Presley Kilgore was killed in a train accident on the Pennsylvania railroad in 1868 at the age of 17. His middle brother, David Hunter, passed in 1884 leaving only his younger sister Anna Burrel Kilgore Jack.

I was reading in my ancestry magazine and found a link to a site with genealogy resources on it. From there I found this photo site. It mentioned that is was originally started for old photos in the Western Pennsylvania area, which is where my mother’s family came from. I thought I would give it a try.

 

They have a surname search which I find a lot more helpful than the guessing game you play with searches and surnames. It didn’t take long and I found a first cousin five times removed. Her name is Margaret Kilgore, they called her Peggy, she was married to John Gilmore. Her grandfather was my fifth great grandfather.  

 

In the area in western Pennsylvania that she lived in, families would lease out their land for oil prospectors to drill on. The hills were stripped of trees and fields were loaded with tall wooden drilling rigs. There is a picture of Ellen Gilmore, daughter of Peggy and John Gilmore, and her husband Newton Mortland,  sitting in front of one of these rigs on their property.

It has been a bit like running the “antique Enquirer” on the blog lately. I have been amazed that it involved my family. The ancestors managed to pretty much kill the story by the time my mother came around. From what she said they just didn’t talk about family and the past at all, the story has been a real surprise to her too.

 

In the midst of the chaos that Edith and George created, 3 families took a hit. George’s family, the youngest being under 10, was scattered about when he took off to Omaha with what would become his third wife. I imagine his oldest son, who was 30 at the time, was left to deal with his younger siblings. Elijah Booth, George’s second wife Lizzie’s son, seemed to have been farmed off from the beginning of their relationship and her so called slide into insanity. The boy would never see his mother again after turning 12 when she was placed in the asylum.

 

Then there was Gertrude Harbottle-Tyrell, Edith’s illegitimate daughter. That child was marked on more than one occasion as an orphan. She was far from being an orphan as both parents were alive until she was about 21. Her father, Thomas Erastus Harbottle, according to Edith, recognized his daughter and paid for her support while she was housed in various places around Buffalo, New York. Both of Gertrude’s parents came from large families. Her mother came from a family of 6 siblings that eventually moved to Northern Michigan.

 

Her father’s family, according to a write up on her uncle, had 16 siblings. I have found 10 of the 16, seven boys and three girls, most of them remaining in Canada and at least one of the boys, Captain Harry G Harbottle, ended up in the Cleveland, Ohio area. At one point or another, Gertrude’s uncles sailed the great lakes as captains of ships. Heart disease would kill her father Thomas on board the ship Havana, outside of Houghton, Michigan before 1899, when he was near 40 years of age. Several of her uncles would also die from heart disease.

 

Colin Clark Harbottle, yet another uncle, would be famous for his bicycling ability during 1894 and 1895. He would then become infamous for the chase across the northern hemisphere after allegations were made of embezzled money from the bicycle club he belonged to. They would find him in Havana and extradite him back to Canada. Eventually he would polish up his tarnished name by entering WWI and earning the title of Colonel. Heart disease would claim his life too.

 

No matter what I search by I am having difficulty finding any trace of Gertrude. Her life consisted of being housed with the Keefs in Canada until being placed in the Episcopal Home. She would be a playmate for the son of Mrs Poole, his name was Gardner. Senility had taken over Mrs. Poole by 1918 and she had difficulty remembering writing letters, shown to her, to Edith and Gertrude. She did remember, vaguely, Gertrude being a playmate of Gardner�