NEBRASKA STORIES : THE QUILTS OF KEN BURNS and the INTERNATIONAL QUILT MUSEUM at UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA at LINCOLN

NEBRASKA STORIES - THE QUILT COLLECTION OF KEN BURNS   a secret collection of the historian's personal quilts was put on display at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum. 

INTERNATIONAL QUILT MUSEUM at UNIVERSITY of NEBRASKA at LINCOLN

QUILTING is "Women's Art" - FUNCTIONAL ART

Well beyond my personal abilities in sewing, I find myself so excited by the designs and the history!

THE DUST BOWL by KEN BURNS - ONE OF THE BEST DOCUMENTARIES AMERICAN GENEALOGISTS COULD WATCH

Did you know that when the Dust Bowl refugees (called "Exo-Dusters")  came to California on Route 66 citizens tried to stop them from entering the state at the borders ,not wanting these people to have any public support?  THE 1930's  MIGRATION OF THE DUST BOWL PEOPLE  DWARFS THAT OF THE MIGRATION OF THE COVERED WAGON ERA!  This was also one of the worst ecological disasters to happen in the 20th century.

This and many other facts that were brought forth make THE DUST BOWL by Ken Burns a film that should intrigue anyone working on American genealogy. The film has a multitude of black and white images of the people, the farmsteads, and the black clouds of dust that devastated farming and caused many to die of dust fever, a lung disease, including many children, and left many with life-long lung ailments.  This wasn't a little dust.  This was a chronic barrage of massive clouds that even left the equivalent of sand dunes of dusk and is a testimonial to ecological disaster that was man made but also man resolved after much suffering.  The film also has testimonials by some of the children who experienced migration who are now past mid-life.

Among the facts covered that are compelling to me and other American researchers are the following:

The clouds of dust were so fast and dark that some people thought the Biblical end of the world was upon them.  The dust blackened the skies and chocked them and gave them dust pneumonia. The dust caused static electricity that made using phones impossible.  The Buffalo grass that they had replaced with wheat is what nature and time had evolved as the perfect ground cover for a sometimes wet and sometimes parched area of the country there near Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle.  Eventually 40,000 farmers signed up to learn a new technique called contour farming which over several years time did resolve the issue, but through the 1930's 80% of the Great Plain soil was eroded.  As a result of the Dust, COUNTIES LOST 30-40% of their population in the 1930's. Schools closed.  (See the changes by looking at the 1930 and then 1940 census.*)  But 75% of the population hung in there maybe because they had families in the local cemeteries.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a train ride, covering a couple thousand miles, in order to see for himself and talk to the farmers.  Now that we know that Roosevelt hid his crippled body, when we see film of him standing, with an aid next to him, arm provided support, and then raising his arm to wave, we know what an actor he was.   He saw that millions of acres were abandoned and that the children were underweight.

Many Dust Bowl families were too proud to accept what public relief there was.  HERE THEN COMES THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS...  Young men made $30 a month and had to send $25 of it to their families.  Some people were critical, feeling that they were being paid to stand around, but others saw that over time these young men learned skills and used their hard physical labor to improve the country.  (I can tell you that there is a park nearby where I live where the walls and steps that CCC's members built are still in use and in great shape.)  And here then comes THE WORKS PROJECT ADMINISTRATION.
THE WPA BECAME THE BIGGEST EMPLOYER IN THE NATIONS with 8 million people employed and saving themselves from starvation.

By 1937 other ecological disasters were happening.  The 1937 OHIO RIVER FLOOD that effected the city of Pittsburgh with houses floating away


THE DUST BOWL a film by Ken Burns is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Television   C 2012  The Dust Bowl Film Project, LLC

Review C 2014 Ancestry Worship Genealogy

WOODY GUTHRIE WAS MOVED TO LOS ANGELES BECAUSE OF THE DUST BOWL and is probably the most famous DUST BOWL migrant.

HORATIOS DRIVE : AMERICA'S FIRST ROAD TRIP : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

HORATIOS DRIVE : AMERICA'S FIRST ROAD TRIP : ANCESTRY WORSHIP GENEALOGY FILM REVIEW

Horatio's drive is about Horatio Nelson Jackson, who left San Francisco in 1903 determined to drive an automobile across the continent of the United States on what was mostly dirt roads that were for Wagon Trains or Horse 'n Buggies.

He had been on the road a short time when other men, who were sponsored by automobile companies, decided that they would beat him or perhaps make it to the east coast if he gave up. These men failed.

Nelson did it for a $50 bet, which he never cared to collect, and racked up thousands of dollars in expenses, and the automobile he was driving was not one of the notables.

A fun film with lots of vintage daring-do that will inspire you to take some back roads on your summer vacation, which begins any moment, since today is MEMORIAL DAY!

C 2013-2025 Ancestry Worship Genealogy BlogSpot

THE SHAKERS : KEN BURNS AMERICA : PBS

The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, is what they called themselves, but because of their ecstatic dancing, the world called them Shakers, kind of like Quakers. Most people today, if they've heard of them at all, think of their furniture, which is very valuable on the antiques market, and quite simple and elegant. (They would have had very little of it in their how residential housing, which was more like dorms with separation of males and females.) They founded a Utopian Community that had several properties or locations in the United States.

Using diaries, interviews, archival phones, music, and so on, Ken Burns' video is wonderful to watch. Shaker life was industrious and inventive, but men and women did not mix and lived celibate lives, so their numbers did not increase. They adopted some children. Some people left to marry and live a more normal lifestyle. Today there are a few Shakers still living and a few properties that they still own.

I've never met anyone through the years working on their genealogy project who found family in a Shaker Community.