Willhelm Articles From Google Newspapers

Google announced it was bringing back its news archives. Perhaps you heard me hollering for joy when I read this? Here are a few articles from papers long ago about my close family and some articles mentioning distant cousins--all Willhelms.

My Mom and Grandmother in the Lodi, California News-Sentinel in March 2, 1950:


My Aunt, the pretty bride. I was thrilled to add this to my research, what a find! I wonder what happened to all those postcards Nancy and Larry mailed us from Canada?


My Parents' Wedding Announcement: Wish I had an original newspaper copy of this piece. I tried to lighten the photo more of Elta, the young graduate. Click on the thumbnails ABOVE Elta's photo to see TWO pages--not just the one of Elta's photograph:


While googling just now I found this on Jimmie Willhelm from Burnet, Texas:

http://www.bobnolan-sop.net/Reflections/Reflections%20htms/Willhelm.htm

TEN MINUTES OF RESEARCH LATER:  Ahh, Jimmie Willhelm is my Mom's second cousin once removed. His parents? Audis and Virgie Mae. Audis was the second son (of nine children) born to Joseph Flemon and Mary Elizabeth (Baxter) Willhelm. And Joseph? He was the sixth of eight children born to Welk Willhelm and Mary Elizabeth (Cowan). Welk, also known as "Welcome" on Confederate War records, is our ancestor who went missing soon after the birth of his youngest, Alice Emily, in 1883. ("Missing" is a nice word for abandoned. Or as Aunt Beatrice referred to it: forced to leave Texas after an altercation where someone was killed.)

I found an obit for Jimmie Willhelm's mother:


I have no idea who this Willhelm is, but I enjoyed the article from The Deseret News in May of 1967 about a college campus in Iowa. I would enjoy hearing Henry's comments about it now, wouldn't you? And yes, I intentionally "snipped" the tidbit about Ginsburg to the right of dear Henry's article. The times, they were 'a changing:


Got all that? I hope to soon post a timeline of our Willhelm family on another site to make it easier to see who's who. Thanks for stopping by! And Google? If you're listening, I appreciate you, Google. You're a researcher's dream come true.


LINKS to articles above:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=fAw0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=dHgIAAAAIBAJ&pg=4916%2C4786218

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=hxczAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jzIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=6976%2C3045678

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Wm4zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2e4HAAAAIBAJ&dq=lloyd-wiser&pg=4656%2C4897720

http://bnb.stparchive.com/Archive/BNB/BNB04282010p08.php

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=7uRNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=2UkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7171%2C6101137


To The Moon, Alice!

My Mom and I went to southern California when I was itty bitty to stay with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Johnny for several days. WE HAD A BLAST, as nearly every day we went some place exciting. Among our excursions was Marineland, POP (Pacific Ocean Park--an amusement park on the beach), and Knotts Berry Farm. In the evenings, we visited my cousins Connie, Bruce and Curt up the street at Aunt Joy and Uncle John's house. What fun they all were! I thought these two families lived like this all the time, visiting amusement parks and eating at House of Pancakes. I remember crying when we left. Wouldn't you?

The highlight of our trip was visiting The Most Wonderful Place on Earth: Disneyland. Walt's park was fairly new, still under construction, and brand-spanking clean. Talk about sensory overload! They used to say the best way to see Disneyland was over a several day period. It was almost too much to see in a day, as it could be exhausting. But for this five-year old, it was heaven. 

For weeks afterwards I spoke of how I got to go to the moon that day in Anaheim. One of Walt's new rides in Tomorrow Land was a spaceship that promised to take you where you'd never been before. I believed it hook, line and sinker. Despite my Uncle Johnny's admonition that if I didn't behave I would "go to the moon" as was the popular saying of the day, I was thrilled to have taken a spaceship and seen video proof on the big screens inside the spaceship that I was indeed in outer space. I was there, I tell ya'! I was.

Here's a short video from the Disney people taken in 1957 of Disneyland. Miss you, Flying Saucers!


 

Heidi Has Gone To Be With Grandfather (and Goat Peter?)

This morning we woke to the news that Shirley Temple had died in her sleep. Peacefully, I hope. She was 85. The inter-tubes were clogged for a bit as social media buzzed with the story. This particular tweet cracked me up:

"In 1938 a witness told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Shirley Temple was a Communist sympathizer."

She was ten years old at the time.

So Many Marriage Records Online

My day job involves scouring records. My favorite hobby also has me searching and occasionally finding records. I especially like finding a new database of marriage records.

http://familysearch.org/ is uploading thousands of records each week with the help of volunteers who both scan, upload and occasionally transcribe to prepare indexes. Best of all, Familysearch is a FREE site. It recently partnered with Ancestry.com (an awesome but NOT free site) on some projects. 

Index = One of my favorite words. Without an index one must pore through page after page looking for a keyword. FamilySearch doesn't always have indexes (yet) for their many databases. Luckily there is an index for California County Marriages - 1850 to 1952, which is where I've spent the last 90 minutes.

Here are a few copies of marriage licenses of my "kin" that I was thrilled to find.

Oral Family History Can Be Lost In Three Generations

I have several relatives whose dates of death are long forgotten. Burial locations and stories about why they died young? That information has been lost. Except for census, land or military records, an outside researcher would question their existence. Good research demands proof. Because some of my living relatives once spoke to older family who had either known the missing kin or recalled stories told them by parents, I can assume The Missing Kin did actually exist. (An assumption also made because they are my great-greats.) 

When a mother of eight children loses her husband, she may only rarely discuss his death. When a marriage is not approved by parents, the orphaned child of the young couple may later find the subject of his dad a closed one. My paternal grandfather was the youngest of nine. He knew little about his father who had died before he was born. Do you know? 

Aaron Holt, archives technician at the National Archives Fort Worth:

For example, if a parent died three generations ago, the person to most accurately pass on the correct information about the death would be the surviving parent, who would tell the children. If the children are young when their parent died, they will not have accurate information unless the living parent repeatedly and accurately tells the children the story until it is engrained in them.

When they become adults, they must do the same thing for their children. If none of this is ever written down, it is increasingly difficult to get the story right through the generations.”

Holt said that in generations past, people did not talk about death and that makes it more difficult for a genealogist to sort out fact from fiction today.

“Until not too long ago, people didn’t talk about death, especially to their children,” Holt said. “There was a superstition that if you talked about it, you were calling it, and no one wanted to do that.”

A Town Where My Family Once Lived


Read more »

Ditch Directory, Please?

I was once new to genealogy groups and asked poor questions. This is an example of one I read today on Facebook. It gives no info from which to work. The writer assumes we are psychic. And the ditch comment? I laughed myself silly reading it:

I HAVE BEEN SEARCHING FOR YEARS FOR MY GRANDADDY IN OKC WITH NO LUCK. I KNOW THEY DIDN'T JUST ROLL HIM INTO A DITCH SOMEWHERE... ANYONE THAT KNEW IS DEAD, BUT I WILL CONTINUE MY SEARCH.