Passing It On

Oxford Project paints vivid picture of town’s residents

The good people of Oxford, Iowa, must have thought Peter Feldstein had lost his marbles..

After all, why would a grown man set up shop in an abandoned storefront in the hamlet of fewer than 700 people and then invite townsfolk to drop in to have their picture taken?

Despite their skepticism, hundreds responded to Feldstein’s invitation, which came in the form of flyers, tacked onto utility poles and passed hand-to-hand throughout the northeast Iowa community.

That was in 1984. Twenty years later, Feldstein did it again. Teaming up with University of Iowa writing instructor and author Stephen G. Bloom, the duo produced a striking exhibit: Feldstein’s before-and-after images flanking Bloom’s brief narrative about each subject.

The exhibit, dubbed the Oxford Project, will be available this fall in book form. The book’s publisher, Welcome Books, describes the book on its web site:

“The portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, laugh lines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, bowed backs. Babies and children have sprouted into young nurses, truck drivers, teachers, rodeo riders, ardent Buddhists, racists, Democrats, strippers, and drug addicts. Time also rewards. Gawky teenagers blossom into assured men and women—the promise of the future realized.”

You can do much the same with you own family photographs by comparing one photo with another taken decades apart. Consider that person’s experiences in the intervening years and how those experiences are reflected in their appearance.

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 courtesy of “The Oxford Project” published by Welcome Books. Photographs © 2008 Peter Feldstein. Text © 2008 Stephen G. Bloom. Preface © 2008 Gerald Stern. www.welcomebooks.com/theoxfordproject

You are what you collect, to a point

People collect the oddest things. Shards of glass, barbed wire, streetcar transfers.

Maybe you’re one of those people. Almost certainly you’re related to a collector. Some are serial collectors, going from one collection to another. In my lifetime, I’ve collected baseball cards, coins, verification letters/cards from radio stations and phonograph records.

Our collecting hobbies help define us. Putting our personal interests on public display tells others these are things we value. Casual acquaintances often see us in a monolithic way: There’s Larry. He collects baseball cards (better only talk about baseball with him).

Most of us are more complex than that. Our collections are only part of who we are. Then there are the collectors whose obsessive passions drive them past the point of reasonable behavior. William James Sidis appears to be one of those collectors.

His story has a sad familiarity to it. A child prodigy with an estimated IQ of around 300 who enrolled at Harvard in 1908 at the age of 11, Sidis became increasingly reclusive and worked menial desk jobs up until his death in 1944 at age 46. Along the way, he became obsessed with collecting streetcar transfers and self-published a 300-page book on the topic under a pseudonym.

From the mundane to the sensational, think back on the collectors in your family. Are there any members in your family tree that you define solely by their collecting hobby? Maybe you should dig a bit deeper to find out what that person’s life was really like.

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 neshachan.

Black hole of cyberspace swallowing up yearbooks

R.I.P., the high school yearbook.

While it may be a bit premature to permanently lay to rest that once-ultimate document of the high school experience, its demise has already been noted in some parts of the country and sales have plummeted just about everywhere else.

My good blogging friend, Stefani Twyford of Legacy Multimedia in Houston, Texas, brought this matter to my attention, referring to an article in the Houston Chronicle.

There was a time less than a generation ago when as many as 80 percent of high school students bought yearbooks, a figure that now stands around 10-20 percent in those areas where a yearbook is published at all.

The culprit appears to be the proliferation of social networking sites, like MySpace and  Facebook, which have made yearbooks seem positively quaint in this cyber age. As one who will attend my own high school reunion this summer, I wonder how the current electronic sites will factor into the reunions of the MySpace generation. Yearbooks are the source document for every high school reunion I’ve attended and I can’t imagine a reunion without them or suitable surrogates.

For my father, his high school yearbook yielded an unexpected connection with a person he’s never met and who lives several states away.

A couple of years ago, Dad received via mail a copy of the yearbook from his senior year along with a letter. The letter explained that the yearbook was a gift from a Texas attorney who had acquired it at a garage sale. The attorney had gone through a rough patch of substance abuse that had cost him his career and marriage a few years back and part of his therapy was to find yearbooks at garage sales, pick one person from the senior class, track that person down and send them the yearbook.

Although the attorney has restored his life and has rebuilt his career, he continues to seek out the yearbooks. My dad was inspired by the experience and, since he already had a copy of the yearbook, he called a few classmates to offer them his extra copy but found they had kept theirs, too. Keep in mind that these people graduated from high school 70 years ago.

Do you think today’s high school seniors will be keeping their MySpace profiles 70 years from now?

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 portia91.

It’s official: You can share a story today

Are you sharing a family story today?

Today has been designated International Day for Sharing Life Stories and many communities around the world are holding special events to commemorate the occasion. Here in Central Iowa, I’ll be participating in tonight’s Two Rivers Story Spinners’ event at Des Moines Area Community College.

I’m looking forward to hearing other people share stories from their life experiences. For my part, I’ll probably tell the story about a public spectacle involving my grandfather and root beer. If you’re in the area, drop by and I’ll share it with you.

Not so coincidentally, today just happens to be the 96th birthday of story teller extraordinaire, Studs Terkel. Terkel, an oral historian from Chicago who became a public television star a few decades back, has a new book out, “Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater.”

Even if you miss out on today’s festivities, you can make amends by sharing a life story or two with your loved ones over the weekend. What are you waiting for?

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

Flickr photo courtesy of wgbhmorningstories.

Cast a wide net to snare those family memories

So, this family history quest of yours has got you a bit down, huh?

You’ve spent all those hours tracking down your ancestors for your long-awaited family history book and now you’re running out of gas? All those once-interested relatives that promised to chip in with your research have stopped answering your e-mails and ignore your voicemail messages?

Cheer up, Bucko. Help may be just a few mouse clicks away.

Even if your immediate family has gone into the witness protection program, it’s almost a certainty that someone out there in your extended family shares your passion for collecting and sharing their family history. It may be a branch or two over from yours, but you need to reach out and explore some of those more-distant family lines. Check genealogical wikis like WeRelate.com or find forums that cater to your family surname or a locale that you’re interested in.

I’ve received gravestone photos of great grandparents from a woman whose own research led her to a small Missouri cemetery where, uncertain who might be in her lineage, she took photos of every gravestone. None proved to be her relatives, but she graciously shared what she had.

A classmate in my genealogy class managed to find an ornate ceremonial marriage certificate of her grandparents by connecting with non-relatives in two other states who had no idea how it came to be found in their family’s possessions. My classmate’s advice: Cast a wide net. You never know where information will come from.

Good advice, I’d say.

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.

Retirement: No … Recycling: Yes

My fellow residents here in Urbandale, Iowa, are very lucky to have Madeline Kaloides as a neighbor.

Madeline unabashedly acknowledges that she’s in her late 80s and has been “retired” for nearly a quarter of a century.  If you’ve ever met Madeline, though, you know retirement isn’t in her vocabulary.

In fact, the title of one of her two published books is “Don’t Retire! Recycle Yourself.” The subtitle is “Time for a new start – new goals.” That’s Madeline.

The first time I met Madeline was a couple of years ago, when she invited me to attend her weekly “Lively Talkers” group. Madeline apologized for her slow movements that day, explaining that she was recovering from a broken hip. Frankly, I hadn’t noticed.

What I did notice that Madeline was particularly adept at keeping the eclectic gathering on point and discussing the important topics in the news that week. She skillfully guided the conversation and gently coaxed comments from each of us attending that day’s session.

While Madeline displays perfect pitch when talking the talk, she also walks the walk as mandated in her first book: “How to Have Zip and Zest When You’re 80: The Little Things in Life All Count.” She blogs for the local daily and responds to bloggers that catch her eye. For instance, when the topic turned to fashion in one blog post, Madeline chimed in with her thoughts on senior fashion. “We do buy clothes,” Madeline pointed out.

You can check out Madeline’s books here and read her history of Urbandale here.

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.

Grab a wrench, it’s DIY Day

I’ve got to tell you, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself these days.

As the least-skilled handyman among the three boys who are proud to claim Jack and Elsie Lehmer as their parents, I take special delight in each successfully accomplished project.

Therefore, now that a few days have passed since I replaced the hose sprayer on our kitchen sink and 1) the area beneath the sink remains dry, 2) the sprayer actually works and 3) nothing has blown up, I declare “Mission Accomplished” in the skirmish of the leaky hose.

In honor of this triumph, I’m declaring today Do-It-Yourself Day on the Passing It On Blog. Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I think every family history project benefits from professional help, even if it’s limited to project management or final tweaking. But, I do understand that many of you like to do some of the heavy lifting yourself.

This blog’s for you.

Here are three sites that will help you achieve your family history project. Just remember, I’m here to see you through the rough patches you will inevitably encounter. The sites:

1. 50 Awesome Tools for Researching Your Family History (posted by Bootstrapper)
2. Best Tips for Working From Home (posted by zenhabits)
3. Free Tools for Family Historians (posted by Juliana Smith)

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.

Shiny, new place to do research

The Midwest will be home to the largest public genealogy facility in America when the $8 million, 50,000 square-foot Midwest Genealogy Center marks its grand opening on June 21 in Independence, Missouri.

The facility will cover eight acres and will be open six days a week, closing on Sundays and holidays. Best of all, it’s free. That includes scheduled appointments with experts.

The center will feature extensive microfilm and microfiche holdings covering a wide range of topics. Included will be a whopping 60,000 titles of family genealogies as well as Civil War histories, Native American records, biographical archives and Black family history records.

State of the art work areas, lockers, limited food services and a break area will make for a comfortable setting to do extensive family research. The parking area even includes spaces can accommodate RVs.

Classes will range from basic internet research to problems with maps or census records. Appointments will be available with experts in several foreign languages as well.

To learn more about this research gem, check out this article in Kansas City infoZine, which provided much of the detail in this post. You can also check out the library’s site.

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 knit_purr.

Think it’s a man’s world? Think again

We interrupt this blog to bring you this breaking news: The Y chromosome is disappearing. It’s damaged, cannot repair itself and will be gone in about 125,000 years.

Lest you miss the significance of this, let me put it another way: No more men.

Think about this a minute. What will your family tree look like once the male line is eradicated? Granted, 125,000 years is a ways off but, according to scientists, a man’s value to women will be greatly diminished before the dawn of the next century.

Sperm counts are already falling and female-only reproduction is just one generation away. It’s already possible with mice. Here in Iowa, a marriage of residents from two small towns is said to have sparked the classic headline: “Manly man marries Fertile woman.” Will future single-sex generations find that headline amusing, or just perplexing?

A world without men will do much more than upset the genealogical order of mankind. Car oil will go unchanged, bugs will go unkilled, sports will go unwatched and Viagra will go untaken.

To learn more about this sad (from a man’s point of view) situation, check out this ABC News report.

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 digitaura.