Family Heritage

I'm taking an online class over at JessicaSprague.com about creating a family heritage scrapbook. I'm using Ancestry.com to help find long lost relatives. It's an awesome resource, and you can try it for 14 days free. Anyway, I've spent this entire, beautiful Saturday in my jammies working my way back through census reports and ship manifests and Social Security death records. It's completely addicting! I've encountered a few dead ends, but on one branch of Al's family I've found relatives all the way back to pre-Revolutionary War time! Incredible!

I've found out some really interesting things, but the really interesting stuff is what I probably will never know...

• Like my great grandmother Margaret Freise was 17 when she married my great grandfather, who was 32. She was working as a housekeeper for the priest in St. Lucas when she married John Theodore Schmitt. I wonder what circumstances led to her marrying a man almost twice her age.
• Al's great grandmother went by the name Clara, but the ship manifest from her journey from the Netherlands to New York (she rode in steerage) has her name as Klaasje, and her gravestone at the Greenmound Cemetery in Holmen, WI, spells it Klaaske. In census reports it is spelled Klaske, Klaas, and Clara. Thank goodness her husband's name was Geert, which gave some consistency to the records. She arrived in New York in 1889, two years after Geert. Geert worked for two years on a farm near La Crosse, Wisconsin in order to save enough money to bring his fiance over. I wonder how she travelled from New York to Wisconsin, and how she made the transition to life in a new country.
• I always thought I was 100% German, but my great-great grandfather was named Jean (John) Baptiste Blong and he was from Luxembourg. His parents were Jean Piere Blong and Marie Jeanne Lochrohr. I don't know, but it sounds like there may be some French in my blood as well.
• There are some incredible names in our lineage, like Hazeltine "Happy" Perkins, Comfort Turner, Hopestill Holdridge, and Experience Benton.

I wish we had more photos of our great-grandparents, but I was thrilled to be able to put these scrapbook pages together with the photos we do have. I'll keep hoping to fill in the missing spots some day.

Sometimes you just gotta make a scrapbook page....

There are some things you just have to get down on paper before life takes over and the memories are no longer fresh in your mind. This is why I am a scrapbooker.

Celebrate Freedom

Photography 101

I was working on a scrapbook page today and I was looking for some "But-Bomb" photos. (This was David's way of pronouncing Batman.) You see, David went through at least two Batman costumes between about 2 and 4 years of age. He wore But-Bomb all day - He slept in his But-Bomb costume, he went to daycare as But-Bomb, he rode his tricycle to But-Bomb's house. But I digress...

I found at least a dozen photos, but this was the best. When I found it I laughed for at least five minutes - not only because a flood of But-Bomb memories overtook me, but more because I realized just how BAD I was as a photographer back in 1994. There are several rules for proper photo composition that I violated severely. Here are just a few:

1. Place your subject's eyes at the line that crosses the top third of the photo (David's eyes can't be seen, but if they could they would be at about the top 1/8th of the photo

2. Move in close to avoid unnecessary "dead' space around your subject (like half the photo being of the carpet!)

But the most important rule is this:

3. Avoid accidentally including a toilet in your photo (Oops!)

For those of you who have given me accolades for my photos, this is solid proof that photography is a learned skill. Oh, and here is the final product of today's work. Click on the photo if you'd like to read the journaling.

Christmas Count Down

Every year it seems to get worse. December careens by like a runaway train down a mountain. And here we are...three days before Christmas (because everyone knows that Christmas Eve is really the big day.) I'm so sick of everyone asking, in that polite "I don't really care" voice, "So, are you ready for Christmas?"! The answer is always "No, but it will come whether I'm ready or not." And I'm definitely NOT ready!

I have been attempting to slow down just a bit. It's hard. But I've found that forcing myself to take one photo per day - no matter now mundane the topic - has allowed me to stop for just a second, or a minute, and enjoy something. I'm planning to put them all together in a scrapbook that will be titled, simply, "31 Days." Here are a few highlights.













This weekend was our annual Schmitt family Christmas gathering, so that is one big hurdle jumped. We missed Warren because of blizzard conditions in northwest Iowa, but otherwise it was a wonderful time. As always, those cousins provided enough entertainment for all. Merry Christmas!

I'm Afraid It's Contagious!

This is a shameless scraplift of a page done by Jessica Sprague over at www.jessicasprague.com. Click on the picture if you want to read what it says.

I won!

Recently, I entered a challenge on one of my favorite digital scrapbooking sites, http://www.scrappersguide.com/. We were challenged to use an absolutely georgeous kit, Timeless Classics by Julie Mead, and we were asked to create a page about one of our favorite things (as in inanimate objects.) It didn't take me 10 seconds to figure out what my page would be about. I was thrilled to learn that I had won the challenge, and was the recipient of a copy of Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage.