Photo Friday: The Big Snow of 1982!

It's Photo Friday! This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Big Snow in St. Louis...or as some may call it, the St. Louis Blizzard of 1982! I am posting a couple of pictures I took during the storm.

It wasn't a true blizzard by official definitions, but it was definitely a lot of snow. The official count was only 13-14 inches, but we measured 22 inches at our house! What was most remarkable about it was that it was not predicted. They had predicted that we would get minor accumulations, if anything.

I can remember that day/weekend. It was a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon. We were out with my brother-in-law shopping a 'tent' furniture sale. It was very cold and it rained very hard—a lot of cold, wet rain—all afternoon. By the time we were on our way home, we could see a little sleet and a few snowflakes mixed in. We weren't worried about it—the weather reports all said minor accumulations. 

But that evening, the snow started coming down. It was a very heavy snowfall! It wasn't long before snow completely covered our shared driveway! Along with our neighbors, we shoveled the driveway late that evening. But the snow kept coming. By the time we had cleared one end of the driveway, we had to go back and shovel the other end again! The snow just. didn't. stop! For almost 30 hours it didn't stop! At one point there was thunder and lightening. That was when I first heard the term 'thunder snow' spoken.

By late Sunday the snow had stopped, but the roads were impassible. This is a photo of Grand Avenue in St. Louis; a very busy thoroughfare under normal conditions.  In the distance you can see the people walking right in the middle of the street instead of using the sidewalks!

We had to walk to the nearest grocery store to pick up a few items. I'm not sure what we bought, but it may have been the classic snowbound grocery order—bread, milk, eggs! The snow had buried most cars up to their wheel wells. Some cars were almost completely buried in the snow drifts.

One thing I particularly remember is Monday morning when I got up to go to work. I got into my little bitty Toyota Tercel and took off the back way. I got about 3 blocks and turned to get onto Grand. There was a bus—a full-sized bus—stuck in the snow blocking the intersection. I had to back uphill the entire block to try another street. Lucky for me, the Tercel had front-wheel drive, which was not so common back then.

I got to work, and of course all anyone could talk of was the snow! That afternoon, our supervisor came around and told us all to go home and not come back until at least Thursday. Authorities had requested that all non-essential businesses close for three days. They needed the cars off the roads so that they could clear them. Closing down a city for three days was a big deal at the time! Of course, before we saw entire countries shut down due to a pandemic!

If you'd like to read more about the big snow, click here to read a story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

52 Ancestors in 2022 - Week 4: Curious

It's Week 4 already! This week the prompt for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is 'Curious'. That is a pretty wide open word, but since this seems to be the year of photos for me, I am going to write about a photo that I am curious about. 

 I am very curious about this photo. The people, time, and place are unidentified. A cousin gave me a copy of the photo a few years ago. It was part of a collection of photos that belonged to my grandfather's cousin, Tecla Kolk. I don't believe they are Tecla or her siblings. Tecla had a sister and a brother. Neither Tecla or her sister married. I am convinced that the man on the far right that he is a Kolk. He has the same hairline and facial features as many other Kolk men. 

My thought is that these men may be Tecla's cousins, Albert and Paul Kolk. Albert and Paul were brothers who married sisters, Gladys and Mabel Hajek. They married in a double wedding ceremony in 1934. I blogged about the wedding here. The men would have been in their early 30s at the time of the wedding. These men appear to be in that range. The style of the dresses me pause. It feels 1920s to me, but it's possible these dresses were still in style in the 1930s.

Here is another photo of the same event. If you recognize anyone in these photos, or have any thought on when these photos were taken, please let me know!

Photo Friday: Lennie Stephen

 It's Photo Friday! I haven't scanned many photos this week, and I need to do some research on the few I have scanned before I post them. So I decided to share a photo that I scanned a few years ago. Earlier this week I shared a photo of my Grandmother with one of her friends, Lennie Stephen. I decided to share another photo of Lennie today.

This photo of Lennie was taken about 1920. I don't know where it is, but the background has a multi-story building. I'm guessing that this is St. Louis. I like the details in the photo that showes the fasthion of the day. I especially like the shoes! The skirt is well above the ankle, but still longer than skirts will be just a short time later when the flappers appear. 

I'm still hoping to learn more about Lennie. If you know who she is, please let me know! Thanks for reading!

52 Ancestors in 2022 - Week 3: Favorite Photo

It's week 3 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. This week the prompt is 'Favorite Photo'! 

I've done this one before, but that's okay. I have lots of favorite photos! You can see one of my previous favorites here. This week I am going to share another photo of my Grandma Susie.

 I love this photo. I don't know when it was, but I envision it as being early spring. I imagine the girls getting out into the warm sunshine for the first time after a long winter. They look so happy and like they are having so much fun! Girls just want to have fun! The truth is that I only know that the photo was taken in 1920 sometime. My grandmother would have been 18 or 19, depending on when the photo was snapped. She had only been in the United States for about nine years at that point. (That is her handwriting on the photo.) I love the detail with the horse and buggy in the background!

I also don't know where the photo was taken. It looks to be a rural area. It could be Missouri or Illinois or Michigan. When Grandma arrived in the United States as child, her family settled in Peoria, Illinois. By 1920 her mother had died and her father had a farm in Branch, Michigan. I don't know if Grandma moved to the farm with him. I know she worked in a cap factory in St. Louis when she was a young single woman. That was before she married my grandfather in St. Louis in 1923. So this could be a rural area in any of those states—or someplace completely different!

The other young woman in the photo is Lennie Stephen. I don't know anything about Lennie except that she was a friend to my grandmother. I remember Grandma talked about taking the train to Mexico to with a friend. I don't know if Lennie was that friend. I also don't know when it was that Grandma took the train. She did say that she took it for weekend jaunts. I assume the friends were escaping from the big city for a weekend. And yes, I thought taking a train from St. Louis all the way to Mexico, especially more than once, was a little far. But it was the early 1900s, so trains were how people traveled. THEN Grandma told me her friend was in Mexico—MISSOURI!!

In any event, I don't know who Lennie is. I do have other pictures of Lennie in my collection. SO...if you know Lennie, or she is in your tree, please get in touch. You can use the 'Contact Me' tab at the top of this page. I'd love to learn more about Lennie and to share photos with you!

In Revew: 2022 v2

 I feel like I've done a lot this past week. Here are some of the highlights.

• Continued working on my FT&B Archive blog. I have enough done, and enough on there that I want to link to, that I made it 'live'. It will continue to be updated over the next several weeks, but you can browse what is there now. 
• There have been some major updates at Find A Grave regarding who can post recent deaths and who is a required transfer. As part of the upgrade you can now indicate how you are related on memorials you manage. I spent some time adding relationships to several of my memorials. You can read about the changes here and here.
  
• In the process, I found a major problem with my mother-in-law's memorial. It indicates that she had a half-sister; that her mother gave birth to another daughter. I suggested an edit explaining why I believe it to be in error. I had some pretty solid reasons that I may blog about later. The end result is that the manager transferred the memorial to me. I will be working on that very soon!
• Scanned 16 photos from the Hixon Family collection.
  
• Chatted with a cousin about our grandparents' wedding photos and who may be in them. Did some preliminary research trying to figure it out. It's probably going to take ordering the marriage license to see who witnessed the marriage.
  
• Posted Week 2 for the 52 ancestors challenge. I'm keeping up! 🤣 I also posted one of my scanned photos for my Photo Friday post.
• Indexed 100 Missouri death certificates. (The 1971 certificates have just been released. If you want to help with the indexing project, sign up here.)
  

That's it. I still haven't done much 'real' genealogy. January might be a 'getting ready' month!

Photo Friday: It's the Plane!

It's another Friday and time for another photo! I have thousands of photos to scan and I'm hoping to scan a few each week. One week won't make much of a dent in my collection, but they will add up. Slow and steady! To motivate myself, I plan to post one photo that I find particularly interesting each week. I've scanned 16 photos so far this week. Here is one of them.

I don't know anything about this photo, but I find it very interesting. I particularly like that there are more planes pictured in the backgrounI don't know where or when or by whom this picture was taken. I don't know which, if any, of the men in this photo is Stu Jr. I don't know what kind of plane this is.

Stu Jr. is James Stuart Opdyke, Jr. I haven't researched Stu yet. What information I do have about him comes from a family tree chart prepared for the OPDYKE - STRIEBEL -HIXON reunion held in Michigan City, Indiana in July of 2002. The chart was found in a desk drawer in Michigan City.

Stu was born in 1917 and died in 1993. He was married to Virginia June Leffel.

If you have information about Stu, or about the plane, leave a comment. I want to know more!

52 Ancestors in 2022 - Week 2: Favorite Find

It's time for another 52 Ancestors post. This week the prompt is 'Favorite Find'!

For me, that is a little hard to answer because there are so many and it changes over time! My answer today is different from what it was last year and what it will be next year. Five years ago, my favorite find was finding two children that were born to my great-grandmother's sister. I had not known of either of them. Both died as very young children and no one ever spoke of them. I blogged about Fara Gallacci and her brother Francesco in early 2017.

Three years ago, my favorite find was the discovery of a previously unknown marriage. I heard stories about my Dad's bachelor Uncle as I was growing up. I'm not sure if my Dad or his siblings knew of the marriage, but they certainly never talked about it. It was quite a surprise to me to discover a marriage record for him. I blogged about that discovery in early 2019.

A year later, my favorite discovery was source—a California newspaper on Newspapers.com. This led me to several obituaries and other articles about my Weiss family that had migrated west. I blogged about that discovery here.

My latest favorite is a little different. It wasn't a total surprise to discover that my great-grandfather's brother, James, and his wife had another child. I'd suspected it based on census records. The 1900 census record states that Mary had 2 children with 1 living. The 1910 census states that Mary had 4 children with 3 living. James and Mary married in 1892 when Mary was 23 years old. So I was not surprised that there was a child born between 1892 and 1900. What I did not expect was to ever FIND that child! There was no statewide registration of births in Illinois before 1916. Finding a record at the county level before that time was hit and miss. 

As you probably know, during the COVID pandemic Ancestry offered home access for the library edition. I used this access regularly to browse records. I was beyond happy to one day discover that Ancestry had the records for the church where James and Mary were married.

Baptism Record for Albertum Kolk
Register of Baptisms for St. Mary's Church - Alton, Illinois
Accessed on Ancestry.com - April 2021

 I was happier still to discover the March 1894 baptism of a child born to James and Mary, Albertum Joannem. There was also a record of his death one year later, in March 1895. There he was, the child born to Mary and James between 1892 and 1900! My suspicions confirmed! Even better, I was able to find other family marriages, baptisms, and confirmations in the church records! And I learned a little about reading latin church records along the way. My next step is to try to find a cemetery record for little Albertum.

For more information about, or to sign up for, Amy Crow Johnson's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (or 12 Ancestors in 12 Months) Challenge, visit her sign-up post.

In Review: 2022 v1

 One thing I want to do this year, in addition to more blogging, is to share what I've done. This usually doesn't happen because I feel like I have to wait until I am 'done' before I post about it. So this year I am going to try to 'post as I go'. I'd like to say I will post every week, but I'm not sure if I will. However, I do hope to post periodically about what I've been doing—a very brief review of things I've worked. If I get to the point I feel 'done', or even if I feel I've done 'enough', I will post about it. My review posts will be more like an outline, so that I can go back and see what I've done and when. It won't really be a 'research log', but in some ways will serve a similar purpose. It will let me go back and see when I was working on a particular person, etc, so that I may have a better chance of finding the details of what I did three years ago. We will see how it works out, but for now, this is what I've worked on in the past couple of weeks.

• I started up this blog. 
• I began a new 'archive' blog and began moving posts from my old blog there. As I mention earlier, I am moving away from the old blog because I feel that if I don't, someday it will move away from me! When my archive blog is up and running, I'll leave a link in the sidebar here.
• Began organizing photos for scanning
  

That's it for now. I haven't done much in the way of genealogy research. This has been more a week of getting organized.

Photo Friday: Happy New Year

 Happy New Year! One of my goals for this year is to work on digitizing the photo collections that I've inherited. I have too many to post them all here, but I hope to motivate myself by posting one each Friday. My problem won't be finding a photo to post; I have thousands! My problem will be deciding which photo to post! That said, this one seemed pretty easy. With the new year, I am posting a photo of a holiday celebration.

I'm not sure exactly when this photo was taken. I do know where it was taken—at my parents' house in Alton, Illinois. I always thought this was a New Years Eve photo. But when I digitized the photo, my mother labeled it as Christmas 1954. Either way, it is a picture of my aunt and uncle with my cousin, Nancy. Nancy was a New Year's baby—the first baby born in the area in the year 1945. It seems appropriate to start my Photo Friday series off with a photo of her.

52 Ancestors in 2022 - Week 1: Foundations

A new blog, a New Year ... and a new start on the 52 Weeks challenge! I'm excited to start again, and hoping to do better on it after taking a break from blogging during 2021. So...off I go!

The first weekly (and monthly) challenge prompt is — FOUNDATIONS! 

The dictionary has several definitions for the word 'foundation'. One is "a body or ground upon which something is built". This got me thinking about the basis for MY genealogical research. I realized that every researcher has a different reason for pursuing genealogy. We each have different foundation upon which we build our story. Some of us put am emphasis on DNA research. We start our journey looking for genetic connections. Others of us follow the paper trail as we build our family tree. 

 The foundation of my family history—what inspired me to start this journey—are the stories! I grew up hearing stories of those who came before me. My great-grandfather who brought his sons to the United States because he knew there was a war coming. He decided that if they had to go to war, he wanted them fighting on 'the right side'. My great-grandmother who shared her spaghetti sauce recipe with her daughter-in-law (my Grandma). She resented Gandma because she wasn't the 'nice Italian girl that she'd picked out for her son. So when she gave her the recipe, she left out one ingredient. The grandmother who died young — when her children were all under age 10. I'd heard the stories, but I didn't know the people. Who were they? Where did they come from? I wanted to know more about them, and so my journey began...and continues.

For me, the stories are important. A good way to start this new blog and new year might be for me to tell you a story. This is the story of a New Years tradition. 

My mother had three sisters, and each had children—my cousins! Two of the aunts lived within 30 miles of us. The third lived 300 miles away. Still, we managed to celebrate together every holiday season. The far-away aunt drove down to our house with her kids a few days after Christmas every December. She stayed until after the new year began. The sisters visited back and forth the entire week between Christmas and New Years. The celebration culminated on New Year's Eve with more food and games and noise. One year my aunt brought confetti poppers for the kids to celebrate with at midnight. There were probably a dozen of us out there popping our confetti and screaming "Happy New Year!" One cousin turned to me and said "Happy New Year, Kim!". I replied "Happy New Year, L!". Then he repeated it, and I repeated it back, and he repeated it, and I repeated it back, and.... well, you get the idea! It went on for quite awhile. After that they returned home. 

During their summer visit that year, as they left to return home, one of us said "Happy New Year" to the other. This started us repeated the greeting over and over. From that time, every time we got together, we exchanged New Years greetings at least once. It didn't matter if is was June or if it was September! This continued through the years until we grew up and had our own families. We saw each other less and less, and the exchange died out. UNTIL...

...about ten years ago we both started using Facebook. On my birthday, all my friends sent birthday greetings—except for this cousin. He sent me a "Happy New Year, Kim!" I returned his greeting 3 months later on HIS birthday. And of course we've exchanged New Years greetings on Facebook every year since. It has become a tradition for us. It wouldn't be New Years until I have exchanged greetings with my cousin. I look for my New Years greeting from him every birthday. The tradition lives on!

"HAPPY NEW YEAR, L!"

For more information about, or to sign up for, Amy Crow Johnson's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks (or 12 Ancestors in 12 Months) Challenge, visit her sign-up post.