Long Island in October

Other things that we did while visiting on Long Island in October:
We really like Jones Beach when there are no crowds, so we went walking on the 2 mile exercise boardwalk and also walked along the Ocean shore on several occasions. Ther are almost always waves coming in off of the Atlantic. Wave height is usually 2 to 3 feet.

We spent part of one day at the Hayden Planetarium which is part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space at Central Park West and 81st Street. We had already seen the American Museum of Natural History but spent a few minutes looking at the African Animals section again.

About mid afternoon we took time to wander through more of Central Park. Each time we go to Manhattan we try to see a different part of the Park. It is so huge that one cannot see it in a day, probably not even a week. It is really easy to lose your way in the park so it is wise to obtain a map to follow. While in some places you cannot see the tall building in others you can see the tall building above the trees. I can see why New Yorkers like this park.

We also had a guided tour of the New York Public Library Humanities Division, which is the building we visit to do our family research. Location is 42nd Street and 5th Ave. next to Bryant Park.

Another day we visited Bowling Green and the bronze Bull, the Cunard Building, Castle Garden, Federal Hall the US Custom House (American Indian exhibits from the Smithsonian) the City Hall Park and walked the Brooklyn Bridge from one end to the other and back. That was a long day but all free except for transportation and lunch.

After another day of research at the New York Public Library we walked to the Rockefeller Centre and noticed they had their skating pad in operation (mid October).

While I probably would not want to live in New York City it is interesting to visit because there are so many things to see.

November 24th Site of New City of Ottawa Archives

November 24th Ottawa
Friday November 21st we attended an unveiling in the cool and windy Ottawa outdoors. The occasion was the unveiling of a sign to mark the future site of the City of Ottawa Central Archives and Ottawa Public Library Materials Centre.

In attendance in some official capacity were Municipal Affairs Minister, Jim Watson, Ottawa Public Library Board Chair, Councillor Jan Harder, Community and Protective Services Committee Chair, Councillor Diane Deans and College Ward Councillor Rick Chiarelli representing the Mayor of Ottawa.

Others in attendance were City Librarian, Barbara Chubb, John Heney and Paul Henry as well as representatives from the Ottawa Branch OGS, BIFHSGO and the Sir Guy Carleton Branch UELAC. My apologies for not naming everyone.

The site is at the SW corner of Woodroffe Avenue and Tallwood Drive. There will be access from the Transitway which will be updgraded in that area as well.

November 22nd German Genealogy

While visiting on Long Island in October we took a couple of days and drove back up the Hudson River to Kingston, New York. We took a short side trip to Saugerties to revisit West Camp and the Palatine monument and plaque beside the Lutheran Church. We then cut across country to visit the church at Katsbaan. We have seen these many times on our Loyalist bus tours and whenever we are in the area. The plaque lists most of the Palatine families from 1709/10 who settled in the area. Two of my Palatine ancestors from this area are George Andreas Eligh (Ehlig) and his wife Anna Rosina Bender.

The real reason for this side trip was to attend the Fall meeting of the Palatines to America New York Chapter (www.palam.org) which was being held across the Hudson from West Camp at Germantown (East Camp).

The speakers at his meeting were Rev. David Jay Webber who spoke on:
The Palatines of 1709-10: What They Left, What They Sought and What They Found and
Researching the Palatines of 1709-10: Miscellaneous Observations and Suggestions

The second speaker was Leslie Albrecht Huber on:
Jumping Hurdles in German Research.

The third speaker was Tonya Frickey on:
The Palatine DNA Project

The New York Chapter is hosting a Palatines to America Conference, probably at Newburgh, New York, June 18-20, 2010. More details to follow later.

Also when we were on Long Island we attended a meeting of the German Genealogy Group (www.theggg.org) which generally holds its meetings at Hicksville. We only do this when one of their meetings happens to co-inside with one of our visits to the area. They usually have at least 100 people attending each meeting. Leslie Huber spoke there as well. She has an interesting web page at http://www.understandingyourancestors.com/

November 19th Movie in Ottawa & Research in Manhattan

November 19th
We went to see the movie Passendaele this afternoon. This was a break from doing genealogy.
This is an excellent movie about the Canadian involvement in the First World War. It also has a good story line.

I am currently working on the images we took on our last trip to Manhattan in October, where we visited the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society again.
I am trying to resolve a problem created by a book I saw at the New York Public Library.
The Chipp Family in England and America with Genealogical Tree, by Charles Howard Burnett, Los Angeles, 1933. There is also a copy of this book in the Family History Library, Salt Lake City.

The author connects the Chipp family to the Kip Family in America, however, on reviewing this connection with what I have in my Kip/Kipp Family in America Legacy file, the facts do not match. So obviously we need to do more work on this connection. I photographed some of the pages out of the book, but I do not remember seeing the pages of sources used. We have a Joseph Chipp (1749-1816) marrying an Elizabeth Kip (1749-1816). The problem is who are the parents of this Elizabeth Kip?

De La Montagne Family

De La Montagne Family
Finished working on the Descendants of Johannes de La Montagne. What I did here was compare what this website on World Connect /Rootsweb had posted as compared to my Kip/Kipp Family in America file and added any new material to my file. To do this it helped to have my laptop sitting beside my desktop computer. I am not sure how many new individuals I added but it was perhaps around 100 or more. These were all descendants of Jacob Kip and Maria de la Montagne, so they were all cousins.

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=REG&db=delamontagne&id=I00007

Eventually this will all appear in an update to the Kip/Kipp Family in America file on my website (Mid to late December).
ca.geocities.com/ekipp@rogers.com

Days 5 to 7 Research at the Family History Library Salt Lake City October 30th to November 1st

Days 5 to 7 Research at the Family History Library Salt Lake City October 30th to November 1st

Continued looking at my list of microfilms.
Total images accumulated on the 30th was 750.
Total images accumulated on the 31st was 490.

On Day 7 we looked at German and French parish records in an attempt to locate more of my distant relative. Not much luck, but now we know what the records look like. I then did a few more hours on family books. One book I worked on a bit every day was the Demarest Family.
Total images accumulated on Nov 1st was 100.

Total images for the week on my digital camera about 2,000.

Eventually this will all appear in an update to the Kip/Kipp Family in America file on my website.
ca.geocities.com/ekipp@rogers.com

Day 4 Research at the Family History Library Salt Lake City October 29th

Day 4 Research at the Family History Library Salt Lake City October 29th

The open hours for Tuesday to Saturday are 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and closed on Sunday. This provides for a possible long day of research.

Today I did a bit more work on the early German parish registers to start the day looking for Schultz, Neumann, Passow and Schmidt. Then I started working on the long list of microfilms we had listed to look at for Kip/Kipp and Meed/Mead information. These are the two families I am specifically working on in the Dutchess County New York area.

I photographed the appropriate pages. Using a good digital camera that has at least 10 MP and anti-shake technology a researcher can accumulate many images in a short time to be viewed later on a computer. It is a good idea to practice your document picture taking techniques in advance so you can be confident you can hold the camera steady. Turn off your flash of course. If you don’t turn off you flash when photographing images on a microfilm reader you get this blinding flash which is light reflecting off of the white reader platform. Today I accumulated abut 120 images.

Day 3 Research at the Family History Library Salt Lake City October 28th

On the third day I spent a bit more time looking at German parish records for Schoenbeck, Brohm, Mecklenberg, Germany. I was looking for occurrences of the Schultz, Neumann and Schmidt surnames. Then I took out the list of books I had printed off of the Family History Library Catalogue which contained references to Kip or Kipp families. These family books are located on the Main Level of the FHL.

This is the morning that we decided to be at the front door of the library before 8:00 opening to see if it was true that there is a long line of researchers waiting to get in. It is true! Every morning that we were there before 8 a.m. there were always about 60 people waiting to get in. No pushing and shoving just waiting patiently.

This was a busy day of pulling books from the shelf, finding the pages in each book where Kip/Kipp is mentioned and then photographing the appropriate pages. Yes you heard me, photographing the appropriate pages. Using a good digital camera that has at least 10 MP and anti-shake technology a researcher can accumulate many images in a short time to be viewed later on a computer. It is a good idea to practice your document picture taking techniques in advance so you can be confident you can hold the camera steady. Turn off your flash of course. This day I took over 300 images to look at later at home. The 2nd day I took over 130 images.

Perhaps I should explain the while I had a few specific objectives for this trip my main reason for being at the FHL was to collect as much information as I could on the Kip/Kipp families, so I could look at it later and then incorporate new stuff into the Kip Family in America file.

Day 2 of our Research Trip October 27th

Day 2 October 27th
This was the first real day of research at the Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City.
The opening time was 8:00 a.m., however, the group waited until 8 to leave the hotel so we would miss the crowd waiting at the door (more on this later). The Palatine group had an orientation session scheduled. After the session, I did some research by finding the call number for Dutchess County, New York and then going to level 3 in the Library which contains US/Canada Books. I spent the next hour there browsing Dutchess County books until it was time for the first genealogy course at 10:00 a.m. This week the FHL was offering courses on German genealogy the first one being “Determining Place of Origin of Immigrant Ancestors in Germany.” Before this however, I had scheduled an afternoon Consultation with the International desk on level 2 US/Canada Microfilms to help me find my German Schultz family in the German records.

Around noon we took time out to walk across Temple Square to the Church office building to get a very tasty lunch at a very reasonable price in their cafeteria. The weather this day and throughout the week was fantastic with daytime temperatures around 70 F. The break also allowed us to stretch our legs and get the blood circulating again after sitting and reading books and microfilms all morning.

The German Consultation (free by the way) was fantastic. After explaining my problem to the consultant, and providing a town name in Germany, she looked up the parish name for the town, pulled out the appropriate microfilm and took about two minutes to find my ancestor and his siblings in the German parish records, which were written in script. We also found the marriage of his parents.

So now I had the connection between Germany and Canada and knew their full names and dates. Later I was able to look on my own and find a bit more information. Later in the week I had the appropriate records translated into English by another person with our Palatine group.
So, not having looked at my list of books and microfilms that I wanted to look at, I now had a major breakthrough in one of my family lines. This was very exciting!

The FHL library closed at 5:00 p.m. on Monday. So this gave us time to recover in the evening, although the Palatine group had scheduled a group supper which we attended.

A number of the people in the group had never visited the FHL in Salt Lake City before, and in spite of the orientations session we all felt overwhelmed at first. We soon got over that!
Edward

Salt Lake City Research trip – Oct 26 to Nov. 2, 2008

Day one Oct. 26th
After talking the trip over for several weeks, we finally decided to sign up for the week long trip with the Palatines to America group of which we are members. The head office for this group is located in Columbus, Ohio. We belong to the New York Chapter. We received a number of communications from the group leader ahead of time, including a list of participants and an agenda and an information package on the Family History Library. We made our own plane reservations after watching the prices of our air trip for several weeks.

On October 26th we were up very early in the morning about 3:30 am to catch our 6:30 flight from the Ottawa Airport. This is a great time to travel by car as there is no traffic. Only those unlikely enough to be travelling on an early morning flight. Actually there was a huge line up of people catching our flight and other early flights waiting to pass through security and US Customs. The flight was a bit bumpy but we managed to land at Chicago on time. After about a two hour wait we boarded our final flight to Salt Lake City.

On arrival we had to wait at the airport for the Salt Lake Plaza Hotel van. We arrived at our hotel before the check in time so we stored our bags and decided to look around. As it turned out, the Family History Library is just out the back door of the Hotel and Temple Square is just across the street.

On our walk through Temple Square we saw the Tabernacle (where the choir performes), the Assembly Hall, the Nauvoo Bell dating from about 1840, the Salt Lake temple, the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and the Church Office Building where they have a very good cafeteria for staff and visitors to the Family History Library. The grounds were very well groomed. We then went on to the Brigham Young Historic Park at State Street and North Temple Street. Continuing up State Street to the North we worked our way up hill to the Utah State Capitol. This was not as easy as it might appear because Salt Lake City is at an altitude of about 4,300 feet above sea leave. Not being used to such an altitude the walking did increase the heart rate a bit!

The domed state Capital is a gorgeous example of a capitol building, but unfortunately being late Sunday afternoon it was not open. Not many people out walking by the way. The views from this hill were great showing the city below surrounded by mountains. Also on the Capitol hill is a monument to the Mormon Battalion. The US Army recruited 500 men from the Mormons en-route to Salt Lake to serve with in the war with Mexico.

On our way back down the hill we stopped to see the Beehive House, the Eagle gate and the Lion House. By the way the Beehive, symbolizing Industry, is the state symbol.
We then went back to the hotel to meet our Palatine group for supper and a brief meeting afterwards to meet everyone and receive some tips on researching at the Family History Library.
The time in Salt Lake is two hours behind Eastern time so having been up at 3:00 an were were Tiirrreeedddd!