Passing It On

Beep, beep…beep, beep…its horn went beep, beep, beep!

Do you remember Nash Ramblers? Kind of boxy looking, relatively inexpensive, the butt of the 1958 novelty song “Beep Beep” by the Playmates?

Technically, I’ve never owned a Nash Rambler but my wife has. That’s her in the picture with her first car, a white Nash Rambler that she bought from her brother for $300. Ramblers were made by the American Motors Company, or AMC. The first brand new car I ever owned was a 1969 AMC Javelin, a sort of Camaro knockoff.  It was one of the most reliable, fun cars I’ve ever owned. That car took me through my entire service career, including many enjoyable camping and sightseeing trips throughout California.

I’ve also owned an AMC Hornet Sportabout, which is as close to the anti-Javelin as you can get. It was definitely not a fun car to drive.

It was a post by Craig Manson over at Geneablogie that got me thinking about cars in my family. Craig’s family has got to be among the rarest of Nash Rambler owners – they actually waited near the factory at Kenosha, Wis., a few days while their car was being built. That’s some serious Rambler love.

Cars have probably played significant roles in your family history. It was quite common even in the blue collar neighborhoods of my youth for families to buy a new car every two or three model years. I grew up in a Chevy family and took my first turn behind the wheel in a sensible 1961 four-door family model. Stick shift, a then-standard V8, no seat belts or airbags, about the size of a battleship when compared to today’s models.

My dad later switched to Fords, apparently after a Chevy let him down, but you’ll never catch him driving a foreign car.

You’ll probably find a lot of family history-type bloggers writing about cars over the next couple of weeks. That’s the topic of the current Carnival of Genealogy. Think about how cars have affected you in your lifetime and incorporate that in your family history.

On Wednesday I’ll post an essay on my first – and all-time favorite – car.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo of Linda Lehmer and her little Nash Rambler by lwlehmer.

Social media sites can expand your family history knowledge

Do you Twitter? I don’t yet, but I probably will. Eventually.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Twitter is another of those ubiquitous social networking tools that have swept over cyberspace. It’s kind of a mashup of e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging.

Although I have a natural aversion to anything that has a fairly steep learning curve in relation to its potential life expectancy, social media are too powerful to simply ignore. Thus, I blog, am a casual LinkedIn and Facebook participant and am an enthusiastic reader of RSS feeds via my Google Reader.

And, just as the Internet has created unprecedented easy access to millions upon millions of genealogical records, the proliferation of social media sites has made it easier than ever to manage and share your own family history online.

I’ve spent some time checking out many of these sites myself recently, finally settling on the free We Relate wiki site sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. in partnership with the Allen County Public Library. As my blogging friend Randy Seaver points out, there are plenty of these types of sites that you can check out yourself.

I picked We Relate because it includes many of the features I was looking for, most importantly,  the ability for others to add stories and pictures from their home computers. My father and brother did a great job of tracking down my father’s family line a while back and someone did some similar work on my mother’s line. Now I can put all this information into the wiki and share it with relatives in the hopes that they will be able to build onto the family legacy with more stories, research and photos. It’s free and very easy to use.

Even if you’re a bit wary of all this social media stuff, these genealogical sites offer a nifty way to expand and share your research. They’re worth a peek.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of blogefl.

Not all final resting places are final, nor are they restful

Do you know where your ancestors are buried? Are you sure?

Most of the relatives I was familiar with while growing up were buried among the string of cemeteries that grace the eastern hills of my home town of Council Bluffs, Iowa. They were scattered a bit, but fairly close nonetheless. In recent years, my techno-gadget-savvy brother identified each of the sites by its GPS coordinates (a good idea, by the way).

As my interest in long-departed relatives grew, I found that their remains were interred in more exotic (to me) locations. But, although research shows some of them buried in a specific Missouri cemetery, my father says that’s not exactly right. The cemetery, it seems, was moved to accommodate one of those man-made reservoirs that passes for a lake these days. Moving a cemetery is probably more common than you realize.

Then today I learned of New York City’s Hart Island. This Long Island Sound location in the Bronx has been home to a potter’s field since 1869. An estimated 800,000 of the city’s most anonymous and indigent residents have been laid to rest there over that nearly 140-year period. Managed by the city’s department of corrections, bodies are buried by inmates – three deep for adults, five deep for children.

Access to this desolate place is limited. Only people who can prove a relative is buried there can get in, no small feat considering that records are sketchy and inaccessible.

Enter Melinda Hunt, 49-year-old artist, who, after 10 years of trying, used the Freedom of Information Act to extract a list of some 50,000 who have been buried there since 1985. She plans to post them in an online database. She is also in pursuit of grant money in hopes of learning some of the stories behind the names.

"I'm trying to show a hidden part of American culture that I think is important, that I think is overlooked,” Hunt told the New York Times.

The lost history of these 800,000 souls is incalculable. We owe it to our own descendants to make certain our own family histories don’t slip away.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Hart Island photo courtesy of laurenbove.

Is this 2008, or 1933?

Although the front page of this morning’s paper was dated 2008, it had more of a 1930s feel to it.

The news conveyed in the four page 1 stories of the Des Moines Register today are not that much different from what my depression-era relatives must have been reading 75 years ago. The good news, I guess, is that Iowans seem to be making the belt-tightening adjustments necessary in this era of inflation, pending shortages, erosion of savings and increasing debt. Apparently we’ve learned something from the trials of our not-so-distant ancestors.

Indeed, some of the trends viewed with alarm today could be viewed as potentially enhancing the strength of family ties, thereby increasing the chance of passing on family history.

A story outlining “signs of the pinch” of our economic downturn points out that financial planners are fielding questions from parents who have allowed grown children to move back into their homes and that families are eating more meals at home these days. Extended families under the same roof were much more common just a generation or so ago and family mealtime is prime story-sharing time.

Another story says that Iowans are cutting legal costs by handling domestic disputes and small claims themselves. Yet another explains that the Iowa legislature is considering expanding the age that young adults can remain covered on their parents’ health care plans and the fourth page 1 story reports that more Iowans are opting for cremation these days, presumably because it’s cheaper than a full-blown casket funeral.

I’ll let the economic pundits argue whether we’re in a recession or not. Whatever we’re in, it hurts, and we can all learn valuable lessons from how previous generations dealt with similar issues in their times. While the underlying problems we face today may be much different from those of decades ago, how we respond to them will be just as critical to future generations as our grandparents’ responses were to us.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of See El Photo.

Snapshots are visual portals to our past

Is it just me, or is there something magical about snapshots? Especially black and white snapshots.

Photos are the great memory joggers of our immediate past. A good photo brings back the emotions, smells, sounds and often trivial scraps of information from a long-forgotten event.

Photography has come a long way since Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre ushered in the era of modern photography in 1839. Having a photo taken was a cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive proposition for many of our ancestors. That’s why so many of those rare, treasured portraits from those older members of our family tree have such a stiff, posed look.

By the late 1950s, though, snapshots were well within the reach of youngsters like me. My first camera was a Brownie Starflash, pretty much a box camera with an attached flash. I was a snapping fool, catching Utah’s Devil’s Slide from a Union Pacific passenger train, the curious Ossified John at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California, and an emergency unit racing past our house. Oh yes, and family. And friends.

Of course, today I shoot digital photos. They’re relatively easy to shoot, the results look good and processing photos is as inexpensive as its been in my lifetime. But it’s just not the same.

Have you been to a wedding where they have those cheap box cameras on the tables? My daughter did that at her wedding and, although she also had a professional photographer record the event, it’s the snapshots from those table cameras that really capture the mood and joy of the occasion.

Professional photographer Jonathan Rubin captured my thoughts perfectly when he wrote: “I own the best digital camera gear and computers money can buy, but there still is something magical about how film records an image. It’s physical, real. Light hits the emulsion and an image forms! Magic.”

If, by any chance, you come across an old camera with some exposed film inside, photo detective Maureen Taylor has some advice on how to reveal what’s lurking inside.

And, just for fun, there’s a Flickr group that’s collecting snapshots in which the photographer’s shadow makes an appearance. That’s one of them at the top of this post. I’m holding out for one that includes photographers’ thumbs.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Antique Dog Photos.

Stay alert: Good stuff may be close at hand

Have you ever had one of those grand moments where you’re searching for one thing and find something else even better than what you were looking for in the first place?

It happens occasionally when people are researching their family history: While tracking down some dates for grandpa, you come across a tidbit of previously unknown information about a more obscure member of your family tree.

Of course, hard-working, curious people who are always on the alert have a better chance of experiencing such joyful moments of serendipity. Many members of my family seem to share the trait of walking around with our eyes occasionally scanning the ground, looking for stuff. It’s amazing what you can find out there.

I once regularly parked my car about a half-mile from my workplace. On the walk into work, I passed several dozen parking meters. Scanning the ground for loose change, I picked up enough cash to bankroll a dinner out with my wife every March. At another time, I rode my bike about 3 miles to work, dodging an array of mechanical junk that had fallen from cars. I picked up much of it and wrote a newspaper column detailing all the stuff I had found.

My oldest son paid for a good portion of his first year of college by collecting and redeeming beverage cans and bottles that he found on the streets of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Since he had his nose to the ground, he found other things, too, most notably cash.

Little snippets of personal history can be found among the litter of our landscapes, too. Found Magazine was created in 2001 expressly to showcase the salvaged jetsam of modern life. The Flickr photo sharing site has a “Found Stuff” pool with 53 members.

While much of the stuff of others that we retrieve in public places appeals mostly to our curious and voyeuristic natures, those unexpected finds of our own family history research serve the much larger purpose of expanding or enriching our knowledge of what really matters to us. It’s important that besides being focused on the task directly before us that we also be alert to clues to what may be available to us elsewhere.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

  Photo: Aaron Lehmer sits with road trash picked up by his bike-riding father. Posted by lwlehmer.

Friends belong in your family history, too

“It's the ones you can call up at 4:00 a.m. that really matter.”

Sounds like a recent campaign ad from one of the presidential candidates, doesn’t it? Actually, that quote is from actress Marlene Dietrich on the subject of friends.

Friends are often overlooked when we compile our family histories. They don’t show up in our family tree, but their influence on our lives is often profound. Our most intense personal experiences often involve non-family members.

I stress the importance of friends in my legacy letter writing workshops where we explore best friends at various stages of our lives. Friends often move so seamlessly through our lives that we’re barely aware of their importance in our life journey until after they’re gone. A lifelong friend is a treasure, indeed.

The best perspective on a family’s inner workings is often from outside the family, from a distance close enough to observe but distant enough to not be drawn into the process itself. That’s why I recommend using someone from outside the family to conduct interviews. People are more likely to say things to a perfect stranger that they would never dream of mentioning to a family member.

Friendships can be difficult to maintain in a modern lifestyle. As Kelly Rigby writes in a recent guest post on zenhabits, “Friendship is like a marriage. It cannot be created once. It must be created over and over again.”

Think, too, of those fleeting friendships that are formed in times of stress, such as “foxhole buddies” in time of war. Often intense, these relationships can help ordinary people survive extraordinary circumstances.

For an alternative view of friendship, check out this 1999 post by Arizona Death Row inmate Richard Rossi. Rossi died in prison in 2006.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Linda Lehmer and friends by lwlehmer.

Scratching that family history itch

Do you suffer from “voracious ravenousitis?”

Footnote Maven uses that bewitching term to describe her appetite for family history knowledge in an intriguing post about the rights and wrongs she’s endured in her own family history quest.

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings got things rolling by listing his three biggest genealogical regrets. Maven added the three things she’s done correctly, presumably to help her combat her previously mentioned affliction.

Among the things she mentioned was her completion of the University of Washington Certificate Program in Genealogy and Family History. But that extraordinary program in Seattle requires a nine-month commitment, a sizeable-but-reasonable financial investment and relocation (for most of us).

Here are a couple of other suggestions that will get you away from that keyboard and monitor for a while, will give you entrée to your local genealogical community and won’t bust your family budget.

Find and join a local genealogical society. These can be found in many locales and will welcome you with open arms. Mostly run by passionate volunteers, they are driven to help people such as you. Fellow Iowans should check out the Iowa Genealogical Society.

Look for the nearest Family History Center. These are branches of the Family History Center in Salt Lake City and give you direct access to that organization’s vast archives. There are 3,400 of these branches worldwide but be warned – most are open just a few hours each week.

Just a note to tell you the first Passing It On monthly newsletter went out earlier this week. Contact me if you want me to e-mail you a copy.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Domain Barnyard.

Ooh, baby...you smell so good!

I’m no rhinologist, nor am I an otolaryngologist, but I’ve been thinking about noses for a few days now.

It all started over the weekend when a nasty nosebleed sent me to the ER. The trip may have been unnecessary if everything I had learned about stopping one wasn’t wrong. Better advice can be found here. (Did you know that cocaine sometimes figures into treatment of a nose bleed? I sure didn’t.)

Our sense of smell is one of our great family connectors. Think of the smells of your past, especially the good ones. Although one man’s odor may be another man’s fragrance, many of our memories are olfactory in nature.

I love the smell of freshly cut flowers, frying bacon, fresh baked bread and baby powder. I’m something of a throwback in that I burn incense in my office while my wife is partial to scented candles. That new car smell is now available in chemical form, but I haven’t sniffed a suitable substitute for a fresh-cut fir tree.

In college, Jade East, Hai Karate and English Leather were popular scents for guys, but I have to confess that I’m not much help when my wife asks me what I think about a women’s scent. I like almost all of them. (Did you know that our nostrils contain patches of erectile tissue and that our left nostril smells differently than our right?)

As a child, I used to love the aroma coming from my grandfather’s pipe. Although smoking-related cancer took him far too early, I later took up the habit myself. I could never understand why pipe smoke could smell so good while smoking one always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Although my smoke of preference was cigarettes, I gave it up while in the 20s and can’t stand the smell of any tobacco today.

Not all smells are pleasant, of course. When I spill gasoline on my hands, it seems to linger forever and a sniff of antifreeze brings the dread of a leaky radiator. Our state fair is a great state fair, with great and not-so-great smells. (Did you know that humans can distinguish some 10,000 different odor molecules?)

So, what are the memorable smells of your family’s past?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of snailbooty.

What places are on your bucket list?

Jann Freed, another of Central Iowa’s talented bloggers, caught my attention recently with her post about the film, The Bucket List. In the film, two dying friends – played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman – work their way through a list of things they want to do before they die.

Thinking about that concept, I recalled another Nicholson film, Terms of Endearment. In that movie, the character played by Debra Winger uttered a quote occasionally repeated in my family: “People come from all over the world just to get one look at Des Moines before they die.”

Tweaking that premise a bit, I wondered: Where are three places in my own family history that I’d like to visit?

In no particular order, they are:

Bourbon County, Kentucky. In his will, my paternal 5th great grandfather, Alexander Breckenridge, mentioned a mansion house, plantation and slaves. Only recently, I learned that his land later became Claiborne Farm, noted for thoroughbred champions Secretariat, Bold Ruler and many more.

Aero, Denmark. My maternal grandparents were raised on this picturesque, tiny Danish island before emigrating to America as newlyweds in 1920.

Smithville, Missouri. Just north of Kansas City, this is where my grandmother, her sisters and many other relatives called home.

What’s on your list?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Cobbled streets of Aero, Denmark, courtesy of Hold my beer, eh.