It was an assortment of boxes and binders, each given to a specific purpose, whether it be Census, Photography, Family Group Sheets or just general collected materials. In those days, it was mostly letters, where various researchers corresponded back and forth, giving each other the tidbits of the trade. I now consider myself and old timer, because I still have most of that collection. Even with the 24,000+ names I have database on my computer.

Having been in the hobby for over 36 years now, I can easily show volumes of materials as my “collection.” I had initially figured on passing down this “collection” to my children or a grandchild. But as fate would have it, I didn’t have or contribute to either a child or a grandchild. So, my concentration moved over to my niece. She could not care less about the family history. One time I got to drag her to a couple of family graveyards and I don’t think she has forgiven me for that day yet.

So, I began to look for other places I could give my collection to.

Library of Congress only wants it in Book Form. National Archives referred me to the Library of Congress.

Most of the research is in Pennsylvania so I checked with the Penn Archives. I got a no from them too.

Carnegie Library wants it, but made no guarantees that it would not end up on the third floor with thousands of other things they have no time and budget for.

Several Genealogical Societies could use the materials, but most of them are under funded jokes that I would not trust to archive the materials properly. One key County Historical Society that would be a perfect fit wants everything bound at my expense or in Book Format.

I won’t give it to the Mormons, nor will I consider anything affiliated in any way with Ancestry.com

I went back to some of the original organizations I contacted about the collection and asked them about my computer files of over 24,000 individuals. Again, every place rebuffed me. They have no program setup to archive digital media.

I offered to sell my collection a few years ago to a group of researchers who tie into most of the lines I research. I received so many threatening or obscene emails that I don’t talk to those people any more. Nor do I share anything with them. I have made my collection a Genealogical Black hole for everyone but a few fellow researchers who were smart enough to stay out of the attacks when I tried to sell.

I am all for forming a 501C3 independent repository for Genealogical Research. Something that is not allied with any religion, corporation or the government. Some place that would be dedicated to preserving collections no matter what medium they were presented in.

Until something like this happens, I am seriously considering buying a shredder so my over 3 decades of work doesn’t fall in the wrong hands.

What do you plan to do with YOUR collection?

The four groups are: Data Thieves, Hobbyists, Veterans, Professionals.

In this article I will define the characteristics of all four groups so that you may recognize which of the groups you fit into.

Data Thieves

Go ahead and take offense at this title; it was meant to be offensive. A Data Thief is someone who does nothing but run around the internet, copying everything in site and claiming it as their own work. They have NEVER done one ounce of original research on their own. They’ve never visited a library, a courthouse, a cemetery or a home town. They just leech the work of others and ask as many questions as they can before they are shunned.

You see these people all the time on the forums. “Send me everything you have about the Smith Family.”

I have developed a favorite response for these type of people. “Go Fish!” I developed that phrase after being thrown off of a couple forums for being much more deliberate in my comments.

These people ARE NOT Genealogists. They are exploiters. Don’t help them. Eventually they will go away like the scourge they are.

Hobbyists

I love the Genealogy Hobbyist. They are so eager to learn and are willing to do what it takes to go just one step further in their search. Many of these people only want to find out one or two things. Some may follow one line in their family only. But all of them show an eagerness that makes you want to help them.

Don’t expect the Hobbyist to have a large Genealogical Collection. Also, if you see them in the Library or the cemetery, they will often have tunnel vision. They are looking for Grandpa Ralph’s parents and are oblivious to the other family members who might be living next door.

These people will attend a class or two but may not follow up for years. They just fool around with the hobby when they get the urge.

Veterans

A true Genealogy Veteran is someone who when you ask them how long they have been a Genealogist, they can almost tell you the exact day and time they started. They have been to the libraries, the societies, the grave yards and they have usually compiled a massive collection. They know when where and how their ancestors existed and can often recite those times and locations from memory.

A Veteran Genealogist can help anyone with their toughest of problems in Genealogy. If you are lucky and they are willing to help. The mood and tone of Genealogy has changed thanks to the Data Thieves and the Exploits of Ancestry.com. Many of the huge databases of these Veterans have no been taken down off of the Internet. While the Veteran may still help you, the materials will not be easily accessible to just anyone. Many of the Veterans of the Genealogy World are dying off and when they die, their research and resource usually dies with them because their family just doesn’t know how to continue or just doesn’t want to devote the time.

Veterans accumulate information. They pride themselves in having not only found the obscure facts about their ancestors, they can often provide you the exact documentation and the source.

Professionals

Professional Genealogists can be broken down into various sub groups, but the common thread among all of them is that they do something to make money off of Genealogy. Many professionals teach, some write, some do research and others gather compilations of information to sell. I guess writing would be the common thread between all of the different types of Professional Genealogists.

I have been in this “hobby” for almost 36 years. When I first started, there were about a dozen people I would have classified as Professional Genealogists. They were the one’s writing the books and magazine articles, appearing at the conferences and basically setting down the standards that the rest of us are supposed to live by. As things developed that pool of professionals grew.

I am not talking about Certified Genealogists here. In fact, in those days, certification was a farce and the taint surrounding the Genealogical Certification was massive and corrupt. I heard people tell of having to submit their work six or seven times before the committee certified them. The committee collected a fee with every redo and some of the best work was being denied certification.

On top of that, the rules for certification have always been almost impossible. In my case, because I have one line that could not be traced, certification was not possible. It doesn’t matter that I have taken all of my other lines back to their countries of origin; some of them, 15 generations deep.

So please don’t equate Professional with Certified. I can’t tell you how many Certified Genealogists I have met over the years who I could almost guarantee you, took their work from other researchers and not their own efforts.

The same goes for those who claim membership in groups like the D.A.R. Never trust a D.A.R. research packet. I have busted several of them in my years because D.A.R. never checks them. They just assume legitimacy and take the membership fee. It’s all about the money. I don’t begrudge someone the right to claim D.A.R. or some other affiliation, if their claim is legitimate.

You can tell a Professional Genealogist a mile off. They smell like a courthouse basement, they have the dirt from the cemetery under their nails where they have spent hours clearing tombstones to get that one vital piece of data. They can recite their ancestors to you and tell you where to find yours. They publish, they lecture and they teach and they will encourage you to be much better at the hobby that you already are. They have a strong contempt for anyone who pollutes the data and anyone who fills the air with improper information based on assumptions and guesses. Their databases are massive, well connected and usually accurate. they are and have to right to be declared a Pro!

Now, which group do you fit into?

Twenty five or more people all crowded around an Adult Table and a Kids Table, all doing their best to grab everything in sight. Passing dishes in two different directions, so the poor suckers in the middle always got stuck with a pile up of dishes and no place to put them.

Does this sound like your home, or were you at my family dinners too? The three or four times a year ritual when the clan gathered to feast themselves into oblivion, walk away and then not talk to each other until the next happening.

In our family, the big events were Christmas and Easter, followed closely by Thanksgiving and sometimes Fourth of July. It was Mid-Western tradition at its best and its worst. In my early years my Grandparents were the hosts on both sides of the family and I can remember being rushed from one place to the next so we could spend time with both. The utter chaos of the moments compounded by the rituals attached.

Football on the television for the Adults and Football out in the backyard for the kids. There were 26 cousins on one side and 18 cousins on the other. I can’t ever remember a time when all of use were ever at the same place at the same time. On one side, I have cousins I have never met and on the other side I have cousins I haven’t seen since those great gatherings of the 1960′s and the 1970′s. While both families had extremely different circumstances, their roots garnered from some common origins.

Turkey on Thanksgiving and sometimes Christmas and Ham on Easter. Home-made dishes and salads that I know had their origins from generations past. Pies, Cookies and other desserts, that made your mouth water and your stomach turn into the endless cave. My grandmothers and my mother could make cookies to die for and pies that should have been National Treasures.

What do you do at your Thanksgiving feast? Do you sing the first Christmas Carols of the season or do you do what we did and pile in the car and go on the search for the first Christmas Lights. When I was a kid, all the stores in Downtown Youngstown used to decorate their windows and it was the big event to go downtown Christmas Shopping the day after Thanksgiving and see all the stores and “Visit Santa”. If you have watched the movie “A Christmas Story” you have seen my childhood in action, except I never got the Official Red Ryder BB Gun until I was 37 and I bought one for myself. I did have a worthless low powered BB Pistol at age 12, but I left it home and borrowed better guns from kids I knew.

How many of you go hunting on the Holidays? Look out Bambi, they’re back!!!!!!!!! I tease you a bit because my family was filled with hunters on my father’s side. I grew up knowing the taste of wild game and liking it. Give me a steaming bowl of Moose and Elk Chili any day. Solid, hunted for country food, made tasty by the grandmothers, a huge tradition that is dying all across this county.

“Tis the season to be Jolly” and I hope you find something to smile at this season. I’ve taken up feeding the squirrels in my back yard and there’s little more funny than watching the antics they will make up to get my attention. A couple of them climb the screen door and peer in trying to see where I am. Ever see a squirrel ride a screen door? Ever hear a squirrel say UH OH!!! ? I have one runt who almost lets me hand feed him. He’s not been afraid since day one. He sits on the fence and stays for the longest amount of time. Just sitting, eating and watching the world go by…..I stand next to him, placing one nut at a time on the post so he can reach them…..Yes, I have named him…..Bucky.

Deck the Halls and keep those traditions alive!

So, here are a few thought for you when dealing with your pictures, whether Genealogy based or not.

First of all, when you take a picture, keep a log.

Picture Number 1001 is: Uncle Joe and Aunt Ruth Smith at the family reunion in Barsto, Ohio, May 5, 1985.

It’s really that simple. then, go to any art supply and buy what is commonly refered to as a Photographer’s Pencil. It is an extremely soft lead pencil that allows you to write on the photo the same information that is in the photo log. That way the two documents compliment and correlate with each other.

I know, you next question is, what happens with digital photography? You number the photos in their file name and also put identifying information in the file name. joe-ruth-smith-1001.jpg. Then you record them in a database, spreadsheet or any one of a number of photography cataloging software packages.

The next issue that always comes to mind, is do I leave the picture in its original form, or do I modify it to remove scratches and other damage. Quite frankly, I do both, except in unusual cases. I never destroy an original for a modified copy, but I modify almost every picture, especially if I intend to use it in publication. Nobody wants to look at a scratched up mess of a picture nor do they want to look at something that could have been corrected with some software.

I have even gone to the extent of modifying pictures to include missing individuals. For instance, I took a picture of my mother and her brothers at a reunion many years ago. Two of the brothers did not make it to that reunion. So I created a picture with those two brothers included so that all of them could be recorded in the same photo. While it took some time and ability to achieve this, I know that it was worth it to show a complete group versus two individuals missing.

Taking pictures of cemeteries and stones also presents some challenges. Unless you are extremely careful and watch your shadows and also take the time to clear any grass or other vegetation away from the stone, you are going to end up with a picture that requires editing. Here again I like to play a bit and merge pictures of the living with their stones. Who are these names on this stone?

I use a product called Paint Shop Pro to do all my photo editing. It retails for around $100 but you can usually catch it at Best Buy on sale for around $49.95, if you watch their ads. While it does not have all the features of Photoshop, it is more than adequate for most of the things a Genealogist may want to do to a picture. take a look at my Photo Editing page on Genealogyland. Those are but a few of the pictures I have edited and fixed using the software.

I leave you with a picture of my grandfather John H. Sweitzer and his ghost of Christmas Past.

A little bit of Holiday Humor……

Don’t hold your breath!

As I have written in other articles here, I have been researching my families since 1974, bringing the count to over 35 years of encounters with people concerning the Genealogy. I have had two situations where I was promised things. The first situation has never resolved and the second situation resolved itself some 15 years later.

In the first place, my grandmother, my father’s mother promised me documents from her collections, including what was to be birth and death certificates, wills, deed and other things dating back to the Civil War. She also promised possession of a Journal, where for decades she recorded family events. I tried to get copies of all these things while she was alive and it was a no go. When she died, I made simple request of the documents and hit a brick wall that hasn’t disappeared yet. I requested copies, I even offered to come and transcribe the information, so the originals never left the possession of the Aunt who has them. All of my attempts were rebuffed and it has caused an argument that has lasted for years.

So, I went through other avenues and found the information anyway, in fact, far more information than I was originally interested in initially. Thanks to the brick wall, I have compounded information on over 5100 descendants of my GGGrandparents on one side and over 1800 descendants on the other side that I am still working.

In the second scenario, I was promised a whole box of Military memorabilia when an uncle died. When he died, my aunt promised to fulfill the grant but simply never did. Many years later when she died, her granddaughter sent me the materials. The granddaughter had no idea I had been promised the boxes and was glad to be rid of them.

If someone tells you that you are supposed to receive something, make sure it is in their will or that they sign a document pledging the items to you. Otherwise, you may have a tough time getting the items. You would be amazed at what people will hang on to when someone dies, where otherwise they could have not cared less before the death.

The same goes for personal items. It took me years to gather back pocket knives that were supposed to be mine when my grandfather died. We never have figured out where the old coins disappeared to…..I hear they were supposed to be mine too.

I have also had another situation, where I asked an aunt for her husband’s V-mail or at least copies of it, and she begged off as some of it was personal. A fire took care of that issue. Wooooosh!

Don’t be afraid to be a little persistent and even a bit forceful when trying to preserve such records. Explain to the person that while you understand their desire to hold onto things, you have real concerns about what will happen to them at the hands of those who have little or no feelings about the preservation.

Yes, I know it sounds a bit rough to be persistent, but it’s better than not receiving anything, especially when you know there are gems to be had within the items.