Images I'm proud to have Saved

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Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

One of things that bothered me while I was scanning in the slides from my grandfather's collection was the decay through which they'd gone over the years. Not only has the technology been availalbe to digitize these photos for quite a while now, but the last few decades of living in a garage (or wherever they lived during that time) couldn't have been very good to them.

In among the collection were snapshots and slides that had gone off the deep end of usefulness. Unfortunately, the majority of those were from my grandparents' youth. I count myself lucky to have saved those pictures that I saved, considering the amount I saved from the 1920s and 1930s. Of particular interest are the pics I scanned from 1906, when the Nelsons were homesteading with mud huts on their newly acquired land in the Dakota Territory.

Even with those in mind, I still love some of the posed pictures like the one to the right. My great-grandfather loved his camera, and he loved the outdoors. This synergy of hobbies managed to survive nearly 75 years, and you see the result here. The cameras at the time didn't provide that great of detail, so to us it appears a little blurry. The composition is still fantastic, however.

Baack in New York Times

Campaign Drum for Grover Cleveland
Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

It was just announced today that the New York Times is offering it's searchable archives from 1851 to 1923 for free. I couldn't pass that up, so I started looking for information on Baacks (searching for "Valley", as you may already know, is a bit of a fool's errand).

I've found a few obits so far, but this little bit from Jan 12, 1871, caught my eye:

"Judge Blatchford, of the United States Court, has granted the motion of the plantiffs in the case of the Manufacturer's National Bank of Chicago vs. EDWARD BAACK and EDWARD BAACK, Sr., of this City, for the appointment of a receiver and for an injunction, holding that the court had full jurisdiction in the case."

Interesting, eh? At the time, the Baack clan was living in West Farms, Westchester Co. (for the most part), and 2 years after this notice, Ed Jr. loses an election to become the county receiver of taxes. G.E. Valley Jr. did a lot of research regarding a family legend centering around the Baack dynasty: That H. Edward Sr. had gained quite a lot of money, but then lost most of it after the Civil War due to having sold bugles to the Confederates. His research eventually turned up nothing surrounding this legend, but this little hit in the NY Times may be some indication that the family was going through financial troubles anyway at around the same time period.

The internet is a wonderful thing, eh?

DNA Testing Now Available

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Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

In the past, when you want your DNA tested, you could find a lab to test it, and give you a paternity or maternity match up, as long as they had also tested a relatively close relative. It was typically used to prove that a father was a father or a mother was a mother. Recently, companies have started gathering data for genealogical relationships.

One such company was recently purchased by Ancestry.com, and they hope to combine the massive amounts of data already available online with the approximately 600,000 DNA samples already tested.

If you're even remotely interested in the world's greatest game (genealogy), you should be able to understand how excited over this I am. Now, Ancestry's even opened the sampling doors in a beta test of sorts. They'll send you a testing kit, you swab the inside of your mouth and send it back. After a few weeks, you get an email with your results, and another email every time someone else enters the database as a match.

For me, this could really break down some barriers. I've got an adopted great-grandfather, and an adopted grandmother. While both of them have identified with their adoptive families their entire life, and no one would question their familial relationship, I can't help but be curious about the biology involved. Particularly in my great-grandfather's case, this would answer the question for us if his mother had given him up for adoption just to adopt him back into the family legitimately.

For some of these questions, we can answer them through getting a bunch of cousins to get tested. At 200.00 a pop, however, it's going to be a lot to ask. My aunt has suggested we just take a road trip to Green-Wood Cemetery and do some grisly exhumation. While that would certainly get to the root of the matter expediently, that would probably raise eyebrows and hackles all through the family.

As with all genealogy, the meaning of the search and the addiction to the hunt are focused on identifying ourselves in this world and its history. Can I really be satisfied with just telling people I'm an average American "mutt" heritage? Is there not some intrinsic value in knowing the trials and work and hardship through which your ancestors lived to get you where you are today?

As soon as I can rationalize taking the money out of my budget, I'm getting tested. If you do, let me know -- we're probably 16th cousins.

Testing My Ability to Cross-Post

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Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

I've wired up my account at Multiply (a social network) to track posts here on my family tree blog, so that I don't have to find excuses to write more and more posts about myself and, admittedly, how cute I was as a kid.

Here's a picture of me, playing my first interactive game. The controller was obviously sized for an adult, and I failed my saving throw vs. inhaling chalk dust, but otherwise, it was a great success.

Here's a tissue

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Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

As I work through the photos, I hit a picture every now and then that I now will send my mother running for the tissue box.

That's me. That's dad. I can safely say that Dad and I had some of the best moments of our short relationship those first few years. We had yet to disappoint each other, so everything went pretty well. When I got older, he realized that I wasn't everything he had expected, and I eventually realized that he was a human being.

But here, right at this moment? I'm his golden boy, and he's a freaking superhero.

Dammit, who's got some tissues.

New Photo site

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Originally uploaded by Thomas.Valley

Well, to date I've been using Google, but Flickr's feature set is just too awesome (like the universe, not like a hot dog) to pass up. Of course, organizing all the photos onto Flickr is a massive chore. I've got around 4500 to tag, put into sets, and organize into collections.

On the plus side, I've modified the code to automatically populate any individual's page on the family tree site if the photos are tagged appropriately. Google has nothing on this feature.