Thursday, September 10, 2015

Scanning Those Negatives

My project this summer was to scan all of my own photo negatives and photos that I’ve had stored away ever since I purchased my first digital camera.  I was under this crazy assumption that I was organized in the storage of my photos, I even had a numbering system, but turns out I don’t know who I was fooling because it was a mess!

Here they all are, and yes, those boxes are full as well:


Ask me how many completely identical shots I have of Cinderella Castle Walt Disney World. 
 

In the end, I scanned my personal photos and negatives from 1979 through to 2007.  I like scanning photos better than negatives because you get microscopic pieces of dirt on negatives that are easily wiped off of a photo.  

The top one below is the scanned negative, the bottom one is the scanned photo, both un-retouched.  If your photo has kept it correct tones and colors, it's definitely easier to scan it rather than the negative:



Add caption


BUT - having the negatives shows me the order I took the photos which was extremely helpful because often the number order was not printed automatically on the back, and for some reason I put the photos out of order in the photo album.  Why would I have done that?  And then I mixed in other people's photos, ugh it was a mess!  :-)  But it's finished now, whew!!!!

So, everything of mine that was a negative or photo is now scanned, divided by sets of negatives.  Future steps will be to figure out any specific dates I possibly can.  I would always write on the envelope for the photos, but rarely included more than the general month!  Sometimes it said “Spring 1988” or “Disney Photos”.  I wish I had written days on there, oh well!

For now I just have some folders that are filed just by developed date, and yes, I had a terrible habit of waiting months, sometimes years before getting film developed.  What was wrong with me?  :-D

 
It was amazing to see how far we’ve come with photos – back in the day we mailed our negatives off and waited weeks to get the photos in the mail, only to find our fingers in front of the lens, or the photos were blurry, or you look like some sort of one-eyed over-exposed weirdo: 

What a great shot!  I should totally make this my profile pic!
 
Now my sister takes thousands of photos in a months’ time.  But I think we value them less now for having so many.  I remember sitting down and poring over my grandparents photo albums.  But as a contrast, today nobody is going to sit and slog through the 12000+ photos we took just last year.

Moral of the story?  Print out a photo now and then!  Give it to your kids so they know how to hold a photo in their hands!  And write the actual DAY it was taken on the back!

Good!  Now get to work!  Next up for me is to scan the box of negatives that belonged to my Grandparents!  Soon, maybe not today though.  :-)

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Emigration of the Triebswetter Domelles to the Mid-West

I know I know, is there a more boring title for a non-genealogy person to see?  It sounds like a dry thesis or something but guess what I don't care!  :-D

So anyway, I've made a lot of progress gathering info on my Domelle side in the last couple years, not the least of which has happened quite recently what with connecting with several wonderful cousins on facebook and other social media.  Say what you will about the evils and annoyances of facebook, but I love it for how it has connected me to cousins I would NEVER have had relationships with like I do now.

What I want to share today is details on the emigration of my Domelle ancestors.  These are specifically the Domelle's that source from Triebswetter of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  The town is also known as Nagyősz and Tomnatic, depending on what historical time period and what language you are speaking.  Since the Domelle's were German, I'll stick with the German name of Triebswetter for today.

I put the information together into a spreadsheet because as much as I hate to admit it, spreadsheets are pretty handy!!

So here are my people, listed in the order they arrived: (Click on the image to see it bigger)



So John and Mary Domele came first, looks like her sister was here before them.

Single 18-yr old Nick followed, saying he was going to his cousin John in Evanston, IL, but he ended up living in Philadelphia and marrying there.  Nick's older brother William was just a few months behind Nick, though he went to Bethlehem/Allentown for some reason and not Chicago or Philly!

Once the sisters started arriving, everyone was out in Chicago before later dispersing to Michigan and Indiana.


And I thought it was nice that William went back to go get his sister Lena and bring her over.  I simply can't imagine the fear that families back in the old country felt as they sent their sons and daughters to an unknown land so far away.  No cellphones, no email, you had to wait weeks/months before you got a letter saying how things worked out with the journey.  We have no idea now of what it means to have patience I think.  It looks like sister Anna was with a family from her hometown most of the way to Chicago so she wasn't alone.

There are 2 other living girls in the Domelle family - one did not emigrate as far as I know, she married and stayed in the old country.  The youngest daughter Mary I think came over, but I don't have any documentation to prove that yet, no can I find her in census records here in the US.  It may be a name-spelling issue, we'll have to wait and see. 





Monday, March 2, 2015

I Dream of.....Architecture

I'm horrible at meeting people, I get so flustered at having to actually interact with another human in person that I never remember their names and I forget their face and I'm also one of those people that cannot recognize people outside of where I expect them to be.  If I work with you 8 hours a day every day at work and then run into you at the Home Depot on a Saturday, I WILL walk right past you with no inkling as to who you are.

I also have a brain cluttered with genealogy and historical facts that have over-written things like the name of a person I worked with 4 jobs ago.  Or the name of a person I went to high school with.



I DO have a wonderfully dear friend I've known since high school who remembers every. single. person. she's ever met, their full and maiden names, birthdays, children's names, previous employers, vacation destinations, everything.  I can't tell you how many times I've said to her "Do I know this <insert name here>" and she'll have all this info just spill out.  Sometimes something she says sparks a dim candle, sometimes I just have to take her word for it.  :-)

I'll tell you what my brain DOES store away though....Architectural details.   Yeah, I know, but it is what it is.  It can be both fun and annoying.

For instance, I'll recognize places used in movies all the time from one movie to another.  I always look at architecture, in movies and real life - when I look at a house in real life, I'll immediately see the addition, I'll see the window that was replaced, I'll see the porch that doesn't make sense and then notice where one used to be.  I'll relate it in age to the houses next to it, older, younger, unique, cookie-cutter, what decade and style it was built in.

One example of a place I always notice in movies/TV is this office building that turns up all the time, I notice it because it's a wonderful atrium in the center with beautiful railings and banisters that they just don't make anymore.  I first noticed it in Wolf, but once it was registered in my brain, I then saw it all the time:




When I watch a TV show or movie that involves moving through some sort of building or house, my mind automatically starts mapping out a floor plan, sometimes its annoying because I realize the movie maker did not take that into consideration and it makes no sense at all.

And beyond all that, I actually dream buildings all the time.  The boring events of my dreams take place in houses, mansions, hotels, cities that are unique to my dreams.   Once I even was exploring a haunted abandoned lunatic asylum!  Yeah, I've watched a LOT of horror movies in my life, lololol.

I find it hard to describe the places verbally to others, I can still see many of the dream places in my head, vividly, in technicolor, but when I try to describe it I say, "oh I was in a house looking for some item".  I'm not sure why that is - maybe there is some connection in my brain that isn't clicking together right but it seems so inadequate to use words to describe my places when I should just be able to beam the picture in my head into your head so no description is necessary.

So that's the background for what happened to make me think about all this.

Lately I've been watching this AWESOME new TV channel (MeTV) that shows all kinds of old shows from the 60s and 70s and I've been watching all these wonderful shows showing the AWFUL way everyone dressed and the AWFUL interior decorating, geeeez what were all thinking!!!!

One of my favorite shows of all time that I watched reruns of as a young child was Night Gallery.  Oh how I loved this show!!  During the summer spending time at my Grandparents I would stay up late and watch the show on Channel 17, it came on at 11:30pm after Laugh-In.  I would set myself up like 6 inches from the TV in the living room, lights off (everyone else was in bed), and patiently sit through Laugh-In, understanding about 5% of the jokes, and then Night Gallery came on.  I hear that the shows were originally an hour, but I've only ever seen the half hour cut up version.

So MeTV has Night Gallery reruns on in the middle of the night and for the past year I just DVR them en masse and pop them on whenever I think of it.  I see now how chopped up the shows are since they are cut down, but my nostalgia prevails and I still watch them.  :-)

Another show I just discovered that I'd never seen before is Columbo.  I know, I know, I knew what the show was, I knew who Peter Falk was, but I'd never seen the show before!  I really like it, it's very charming and there's all these guest stars from the 70s who are just fabulous.

So there I was on a Sunday night not too long ago, all comfy cozy and watching Columbo annoy someone and I realize immediately that I recognize the set.  It's from a Night Gallery episode and I know which one, it was the one with Leonard Nimoy, oh Leonard, Rest in Peace.  The next day I went to the interwebs and voila, there's the Night Gallery episode on hulu (yay Hulu!!!):




And here's the same set from Colombo episode "Requiem for a Falling Star", different door to the outside, changed the pillow color on the wicker furniture (the SAME furniture even!!!!) and voila!:


Apparently, the 2 episodes were filmed a few months apart.

I know it's kind of weird, but I thought it was pretty cool that now in addition to real places I can start cataloging in my brain when sets are re-used between shows.  :-)

I might not remember your face or your name, but if you show me a photo of your house or living room I bet I remember that.  :-)

It does help when I'm scanning old family photos and trying to figure out whose living room or whose house it is so I guess I'll keep it as my strange little talent.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Where the Domelle's Came From

So I recently obtained a new copy of the family book for the "home town" of my great-grandfather, William Domelle (my maternal great-grandfather), born in 1882.  This is my only photo of him, taken circa 1907 with his first wife Magdalena Tirjung, probably in Gattaja (the town where they married):




His home town is known by several names, it's modern day Tomnatic in Romania, but when he lived there it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was know as Triebswetter in German and Nagy Osz in Hungarian.

Although in Hungary, they were mostly all ethnic Germans (and some French) in the town as they were part of the great migration of Germans down into this area in the 1700s. 

William (and other Domelle's) came to America and settled in the Chicago/North East Indiana area.  William married again and had my grandfather.

The oral history my grandfather always told me was that the Domelle's came from the Alsace Lorraine region.  The wonderful news is that statement has been proved very well!!!

Using the church records transcribed in the Triebswetter Familienbuch, I was able to trace back to find all the other surnames that became part of my great-grandfather, as well as find where many of those family lines came from.

The Domelle's (also spelled Domele, Dommeley, Dumele, Tomule, Tomerle) were part of the migration of many German families southwest to modern day Romania/Serbia/Hungary.

So if you are a descendent of any of the kids of Adam Domelle/Domele and Christina Reiser/Reizer (William Domelle, Nick Domelle, Anna Tischler or Lena Bozung):



 Then these are surnames that are part of your ancestry:
 
ADAM
ALBERT
ANTOINE
BAUER
BETHLE
DETARD
DOPHING
FLAUSS
FLORENT
GEORG
GROSS-THIEL
GUINOT
HOULLE
HUBER
HUPPERTS
KELLER
KLEIN
LAUER
LEONARD
MARCHAL
MEYER
MORSCH
PELTE
PFAFF
PFEIFFER
PIERRE
REISER
SCHNEIDER
SCHREIBER
STROHOFFER
WOLF

Great names huh?  Definitely a mix of German and French in there which makes total sense once I show you a map of their origins.  I don't have the source town for every name, but I have a lot of them and here's where Adam and Christina's ancestors came (modern map showing the town names):



Nice grouping, right?  A ton of them came from what is modern day France - specifically the Moselle region in Lorraine, just like my Grandpa said.  :-)

But now, here's something to place it in context before you start saying, oh they're all French - remember this is the long, as in centuries long, contested Alsace-Lorraine region that went back and forth between France and Germany and was of course it's own region before there was a Germany.  Here's a historical map from 1648 that shows a red circle around the same area where the towns are marked above.  This is about 60 or so years before people first started making the move from this area down to Austria/Hungary:


Cool right?  SO COOL!

But wait, there's more!  So several years back my paternal Grandfather William Adam Domelle, grandson of Adam Domelle and Christine Reiser, humored me by allowing me to send in his DNA to familytreedna.com.  Here are his results showing origin:






See the darkest red area?  IT MATCHES!  Of course I can't separate out whatever DNA my grandfather got from his mom Elizabeth Obendorfer who is one of the most frustrating brick walls ever, but Grandpa's results are consistent with the map of the source towns.

So all in all I'm pretty pleased with where I've gotten with the Domelle side, this has been some great progress.  :-)