Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your "Heritage Pie" Chart

Randy at Genea-Musings posted this week's idea for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your "Heritage Pie" Chart. Since I have a weakness for charts and graphs, I thought I'd play along.

Your mission tonight, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  List your 16 great-great-grandparents with their birth, death and marriage data (dates and places).  [Hint - you might use an Ancestral Name List from your software for this.]

2)  Determine the countries (or states) that these ancestors lived in at their birth and at their death.

3)  For extra credit, go make a "Heritage Pie" chart for the country of origin (birth place) for these 16 ancestors. [Hint: you could use the  chart generator from Kid Zone for this.] [Note: Thank you to Sheri Fenley for the "Heritage Pie" chart idea.]

4.  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a post on Facebook or google+.

My list and chart is after the jump...

Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Ancestral Name List Roulette

Mary Hay Stotler, age 19

Randy at Genea-Musings has some more entertainment for us tonight: Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Ancestral Name List Roulette:

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) How old is one of your grandfathers now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your 'roulette number.'

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an 'ahnentafel'). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the 'roulette number.'

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook note or comment, or as a comment on this blog post.

5) If you do not have a person's name for your 'roulette number' then spin the wheel again - pick a grandmother, or yourself, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

Mary Ross and her mother Mary (Stotler) Ross

I used Elvis John Brassfield, who would have been 90 years old November 2010. That translates to a number of 23. #23 on my ahnentafel is Mary Hay Stotler, a frequent subject of this blog, so I have some details about her.

Three facts are pretty easy for Mary since I have most of her basic details. She was born in Piatt County, Illinois January 27, 1864. She Married John Franklin Ross March 27, 1889. She died February 15, 1959 and is buried at Lake Creek Cemetery, Rockwell City, Calhoun, Iowa.

Looks like the hardest part of this exercise was determining who was in what position on my ahnentafel, but I already had it figured out to the 20's. Thanks Randy for the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What are they searching for?

Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What are they searching for?:

"Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1) Go to your Blog Statistics website (e.g., StatCounter, Google Analytics, etc.) and find the page for 'Keyword Searches' done on your blog.

2) Tell us some of the funniest or most interesting keyword searches and your reaction to them. Write your own blog post or put them in a comment to this post, or in a comment or status on Facebook.

Have fun!

This blog doesn't get much traffic, and I have less than a dozen keywords listed by Google analytics and Blogger's stats page. I kind of expected more Elvis Presley related keyword hits because of the focus on my grandfather Elvis John Brassfield and his grandfather Elvis H. Brassfield. However, I only had one that seemed Elvis Presley related: "the fact that elvis s grandma"

I had some fairly targeted searches like b24 "asbestos alice", one of the B-24's that Elvis J. Brassfield flew on in WWII, but the page they were sent to didn't have much information. Not too many pages share those keywords, so it's easy to see how they ended up on my page. Maybe some time in the future I will have some more information to post about Asbestos Alice and the missions Elvis flew. I see that someone liked that Tombstone Tuesday post so much that they stole it and put it on their own World War II blog. Their blog is shut down now, but google still has it in the cache. I didn't think anything I'd write would be worth stealing, but I guess it was. Maybe it's time to start adding a more obvious copyright notice, but I doubt that will help.

A similar search found the same page, elvis brassfield 445th, but again I didn't provide them with much information. It's interesting to see the other pages with the same keywords, but also disturbing to see other spam sites that have stolen my text. I guess that's the dark secret of the internet, that anything useful you add to it will be stolen. I can only hope that these posts will find their way to a distant cousin or genealogy researcher and help them in their research even in some small way. The internet has helped me greatly in my research and this is one small way I can help give back a little.

Another interesting keyword search is "charlotte temple bird", but I didn't have much info about her for them to find. I do have some things I need to post someday. Charlotte Temple (Parker) Bird (1842-1923) is my 2nd great grand aunt and I even have a photo of her tombstone from a visit to Wautoma Union Cemetery, Wautoma, Wisconsin in 2009. She was the sister of Valois Denemore Parker, so she will definitely have a post or two about her in the future.

Well those keywords were the most interesting to me. Thanks Randy, at Genea-Musings, for the idea to look at some of the keywords and for the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Photo Effects

Randy at Genea-Musings blog has a regular feature called Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. This week's fun was to try out samples of various photo effects and post a sample. Here's the link over to his blog:
Genea-Musings: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Photo Effects

This photo is cropped to show just Frank Brown Fowlie (1892-1977) from a group photo of Fowlie's from the mid-1920s. Frank looks super-serious in this particular photo and the look always struck me. The engraving photo effect makes it look like he belongs on a $50 dollar bill or something. The original photo looked like it could belong on a wanted poster or something, but I couldn't think of what he would be wanted for. Maybe he would be wanted for excessive use of that certain shade of green paint? It's probably been 50 years since he bought that paint and I bet there is still stuff laying around that has that color on it....