31 August 2018

ANGEL GOWNS - BEAUTIFUL GARMENTS MADE FROM WEDDING DRESSES FOR THE LITTLE ANGELS

At one time, when I was just starting to understand heaven and hell and knew that babies were to be baptized, I asked my mother what happened to babies that hadn't been baptized yet.  She said they went right to heaven.

I went to a Christian Music festival held in a park in Southern California recently and, as I went around the booths, I came to one that had a wedding dress hanging and little outfits on the table.  I didn't make the connection right away and when I asked what ANGEL GOWNS was all about, tears sprung from my eyes. What a beautiful idea.

ANGEL GOWNS is an effort that goes on all over the nation, and so rather than give you a specific link, I encourage you to put those words in a search engine and find the closest location to you or go to the national link here : https://www.nicuhelpinghands.org/programs/angel-gown-program/.  Volunteers get together to sew ANGEL GOWNS at various locations. There is an art to it, such as deciding how to cut a wedding dress just right to make it most useful.  I'm told that women come in with their boxed wedding dresses and love that the dress will be re-purposed for such a good cause.

Basically, many of the little angels who will wear the garments made from DONATED WEDDING DRESSES, are newborns and infants who have died.  They were preemies or too ill to make it.  The parents appreciate the gift of one of these beautiful garments to dress their baby.

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22 August 2018

SHIP MANIFESTS and THE ELUSIVE POOR ANCESTOR

There is so much romance attached to ancestors coming through Ellis Island in steerage, that you may be surprised to know that the 1st and 2nd class passengers could skip the whole Ellis Island scene and were left off first in New York.

It may surprise you to learn that your ancestor actually didn't make just one trip, but several back and forth before having taken care of all their business in the old country, such as selling property, settling old mom - too old to immigrate - with relatives. 

It may also surprise you to learn that there were other, busy ports, including Canadian ports, or that your ancestor may have taken a trip to Argentina first, checked it out, and then decided to come to the United States.  Your ancestor may have also come on a ship that wasn't one of the big-line steamships.  There were people coming in as crew.  There were still sail ships operating coming into smaller and unofficial ports.  You may have checked all the available databases out, straining through near unreadable handwriting, missing manifests, and so on; all you know is that they are suddenly on a census.

If you find their naturalization papers, you will probably learn that they declare the date they arrived and the name of the ship.  For some, obtaining evidence of this voyage, if they didn't still have a ticket /paperwork still on them, was a step towards naturalization.  Even if those ship manifests or passenger lists no longer exist they will name the date and ship and often place.

During the pre-aviation era, ships were the way to go.   The romance of immigrants coming in by ship sort of negates what else was going on.  Such as people who were traveling back and forth to Europe on business, such as spending sprees for fashionable clothing, banking and investments, and visiting relatives or taking long vacations for pleasure.  People walking across borders.  People who skipped Ellis and questions about disease and mental health.  If an immigrant wanted to bring a sibling along who probably wouldn't pass through Ellis, say because they were "slow," they might suggest the person was a shy twelve year old rather than a budding fifteen.

What reminded me of all this was a relations question about our great-grandmother.  By using oral history about the age of the first child, said to be in her mother's arms when they arrived to meet up with our great-grandfather, I had not found her on my first efforts with microfilms of ships coming into New York.  I assumed New York.  The assumption turned out to be right.  But I calculated after finding the first child's birth date on the Social Security Death Index to another date.  This time the first microfilm I rolled had them there.  Previously I had found great-grandfather's immigration.  Yes he was there before she was.  My relations questioned the parentage of this first child.  Without knowing if she was possibly born premature or late, and based on her strong resemblance to him, I had not doubt she was the child of our great-grandparents.  Yet, this made me go back into the ship manifests to check out other men with the same name.

As it turned out I was able to verify that indeed great-grandfather had made two trips.  On one ship manifest it says WHERE DID YOU LEAVE?  Since this village was near the larger town that both referred to as having come from, well....  on the first trip it says WHERE WERE YOU BORN?  In this case the man with the same name gives a different answer.  He refers to a larger region that contains the village that he left, and this lead me to realize that he was probably not BORN exactly where he left.  This actually has opened up the place I can look for records of his birth and possibly their marriage.

In any case, though two trips makes sense, I won't consider this proofed until I can prove that two men of the same age, name, and region, did not exist at the same time.

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18 August 2018

JEFFERSON DAVIS - AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT : DVD FILM REVIEW

JEFFERSON DAVIS - AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT The Life Story of the First and Only President of the Confederacy a Kultur DVD 


ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW:

This 3 DVD set was so enlightening! I promise I will watch the film in its entirety one more time! I realized just how ignorant I was of the Confederacy. In this portrait of the man, I learned that until the Civil War Davis first and foremost considered himself an AMERICAN. He was an Army officer, a congressman, the Secretary of War, and a two term Mississippi senator, and one of the greats who found the Smithsonian Institute, and "largely responsible" for the current design on the U.S. Capitol. As things turned out Davis was on the wrong side of the Civil War and lead years of life afterwards in which he struggled to support his family or again live to his potential. Jefferson Davis also had a profoundly tragic personal life, like his old colleague Abraham Lincoln. His life spanned that of the 19th century.

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Personally, I dislike that various confederacy statues and historical displays are being taken down.  Just because the South lost?  Or because there is an assumption that the South, and all who were on that side, were all about racism - rather than economics. I realize this is not a politically correct opinion, but I think that if this continues, all the California Missions will be taken down too.  Off the go to "graveyards," but some day they will be refound and unveiled; this has happened in other countries.

Leave them up and learn history!  A tour guide can always make such things part of a discussion.  For instance one tour of a California Mission I took was guided by a fake Franciscan Friar in his brown garb with the rope belt and sandals whose personal opinion was against the Catholic Church. Believe it or not.  Yet I've met a couple Native American ancestry people who think that they are better off because they became Catholics - this is Arizona.

GENEALOGY DOCUMENTS sometimes prove that things taught in classrooms are not true.  For instance, I was taught Mexicans and Native Americans were always friends.
Some Americans believe all Native Americans were peaceful and unified when it fact some of them warred with each other.  Some Native Americans owned slaves, some married them, and I've seen that on census records. The Civil War issues split up some families.

So I like to say that history is "niche specific."

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