Remembering Frieda Caroline Hann (1896-1979)

Frieda Hann, Chicago, c. 1917

Pausing today to remember my paternal grandmother, Frieda Caroline Hann Loe, who was born 115 years ago today at 93 Webster Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. 

Her Austrian father, Gottfried Hann, died two months before she was born. Her Swedish mother, Anna Lovisa Larsdotter Hann, raised my grandmother and two older siblings with the help of her sister, Hedda Larsdotter. 

I found a baptism record for my grandmother in the parish records of St. Teresa's Catholic Church, where she was baptized on 31 Jan 1897 as Friderica Carolina Martha Hahn. 

Finding this record helped me with my Austrian brick wall because her godfather was her uncle, Ehrenreich Hann, who, unlike his brother, lived a long life and prospered in Chicago as a saloon owner.

Frieda Hann's baptismal record, St. Teresa's, Chicago, 1897.

Along she was raised in great poverty, my grandmother was one of the most generous and gentle people I've ever known. Happy birthday, Grandma Loe!

Tuesday's Tip: Getting Ready for the 1940 Census

The online debut of the 1940 census is now only three-and-a-half months away. At 9 a.m. Eastern on April 2, 2012, the National Archives will make the census available for research free of charge.

 The upcoming release of the 1940 census is a classic good news/bad news situation. Good: we get access to those wonderful records and bad because they won't be indexed (at first).

So how do you make use of the 1940 census before it's indexed? With a little prep work, you can be all ready to go on 2 April. 

Stephen Morse has put up a page on three ways you can access the census, depending on whether your ancestors lived in a big city, a rural area, or if they were still living in the same location as the 1930 census. Visit his page at http://stevemorse.org/census/ to access the utilities for various addresses. 

For more information about the 1940 census, including FAQs and information about the questions asked, visit their page on the 1940 Census Records.

Merry Christmas!

No long post today, just a nostalgic trip back through the Sears Wishbook from 1964, when I got a Skipper doll – Barbie's little sister for those of you not up on your Barbie trivia – along with a carload of other longed-for Barbie stuff for Christmas. 

If you'd like to look at your Christmas Past, you can visit WishbookWeb.com and find Speigels 1933, Sears 1940, Lord & Taylor 1941, Sears 1942-1944, and dozens of others all the way up to Sears 1988. (You can also laugh at the god-awful clothes from the 1970s.) I don't know who is digitizing those giant vintage mail order catalogs, but I'm glad they are. 

Follow Friday: Dating Photographs and Visual Literacy

The Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress has a great page up on visual literacy, a term that embraces image history, photographic processes, content, and meaning. If you have ever used a magnifying glass on a photograph to try to read a calendar on a wall or a license plate, then you're employing visual literacy.

LC's site is a great resource, combining links on Identifying and Interpreting Images, Resources for Learning More About Researching Images, and Researching Specific Prints and Photographs in LC's Collections. Visit their site at:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/resource/researchertool.html.

Tombstone Tuesday: Lee Soucy, USS Utah Pearl Harbor Survivor

USS Utah Memorial, Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 6 Dec 2011

Today's Tombstone Tuesday is a bit unusual because the tombstone is the USS Utah, a converted battleship that was sunk in the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 Dec 1941. The USS Arizona and the USS Utah are the only surviving underwater memorials left at Pearl Harbor and only the Arizona is open to the public.

Because my husband is a retired Army officer, we were able to stay right on Ford Island. One of the 70th anniversary events was held at sunset on 6 Dec 2011 at the USS Utah Memorial, honoring those who died there and to inter the ashes of one of the Utah survivors, Lee Soucy. 

An article about the 2011 Pearl Harbor survivor interments notes:

[Soucy] had just finished breakfast that Sunday morning when he saw planes dropping bombs on airplane hangars. He rushed to his battle station after feeling the Utah lurch, but soon heard the call to abandon ship as the vessel began sinking. He swam to shore, where he made a makeshift first aid center to help the wounded and dying. He worked straight through for two days.

The Utah lost nearly 60 men on Dec. 7, and about 50 are still entombed in the battleship. Today, the rusting hull of the Utah sits on its side next to Ford Island, not far from where it sank 70 years ago.

Survivors at the USS Utah Memorial ceremony, 6 Dec 2011

More about the late Lee Soucy's Pearl Harbor experience is available here and here. 

My husband and I feel privileged to have attended the 70th anniversary Pearl Harbor commemorations – and the ceremony for Mr. Soucy in particular – last week.

Follow Friday: Family History and Digital Preservation

The Signal is the blog for the digital preservationists working at the Library of Congress.  It's fun and informative for genealogists. Recently they published a two-part post on Family History and Digital Presenvation:

Amassing a collection of digital files raises the issue of how to store and preserve that collection. Digital genealogy could result in a heap of text files (such as GEDCom files), image scans (most sites enable you to save an image in either JPEG, TIFF or PDF formats), audio files and video files. It’s best to follow the Library of Congress’s personal archiving advice, which is basically to: 1) organize everything within one collection folder, 2) backup your collection onto several storage media in several different places and 3) migrate your collection every five years or so to new storage media.

 For more information, visit Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

70th Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor Attack

Today is the the seventieth anniversary of "a date which will live in infamy," the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated America's entry into World War II. That day 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 wounded. 

Predictably, my favorite book about this event has to do with family history. It's USS Arizona's Last Band: The History of U.S. Navy Band Number 22, by Molly Kent. She lost her brother, C.R. William, who was aboard the USS Arizona, so her book is a labor of love. There is a companion Web site that is really well done. 

Another Web site worth visiting is the one documenting the USS West Virginia. They have a complete Pearl Harbor Casualty List if you are researching a particular person.

Follow Friday: The National Archives Puts Its Holdings on the Map Via Historypin

I've written a few time about Historypin, an online tool that allows people to view and share history through Google Maps and Google Street View technology. The site is produced by We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google. The goal is to become the largest user-generated archive of the world's historical images and stories. 

The National Archives announced a few days ago that it has joined Historypin. Visit the National Archives on Historypin at http://www.historypin.com/profile/view/USNatArchives.

The Historypin platform enables content owners to upload historical photographs, videos and audio recordings to Google maps, where they are then geo-tagged and dated.  Users are encouraged to add descriptive information and personal narratives to these items, helping to tell the story of how familiar environments have changed over time.  This content can be compiled into topical, chronological or geographic collections as well as tours that let users virtually explore a place, time or storyline.  Historypin is accessible via its full website or on the go with its smartphone app. 

The National Archives on Historypin launches with a selection of Mathew Brady Civil War photographs; images from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica photographic documentation project of the 1970s; photographs of streets, buildings, and historic events in Washington, DC; and images used in the recent History Happens Here augmented reality contest.  Future monthly updates will include Documerica, Mathew Brady, and Brooklyn Navy Yard collections among others.

The National Archives is the first U.S. Federal Executive Branch agency to partner with Historypin and joins the New York Public Library, Library of Congress, and over 100 archives, libraries and museums in the United States and Europe in reaching a new locally minded and globally active community.

Historypin is a way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history. Everyone has history to share: whether it’s sitting in yellowed albums in the attic, collected in piles of crackly tapes, conserved in the 1000s of archives all over the world or passed down in memories and old stories. Each of these pieces of history finds a home on Historypin, where everyone has the chance to see it, add to it, learn from it, debate it and use it to build up a more complete understanding of the world. Historypin has been developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google.

Upcoming NARA Program on the 70th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

My husband and I are going to attend the ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor next week. If you're in Washington, you can attend a free public program at the National Archives.

On Wednesday, December 7th at 7 PM, The National Archives, in partnership with the Newseum, commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack with a free public program in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Building. 

 

The program, “It Is No Joke—It Is a Real War”: How Americans First Learned of Pearl Harbor, features journalist Marvin Kalb using film, audio, and photographic records from the National Archives and the Newseum to discuss how the media informed Americans of the 1941 attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 

The National Archives Building in Washington, DC, is located on the National Mall at Constitution Ave. and 7th Street, NW. Metro accessible on Yellow or Green lines, Archives/Navy Memorial station.  The public should use the Special Event entrance on Constitution Avenue and 7^th Street, NW. To verify the date and times of the program, call the National Archives Public Programs Line at: (202) 357-5000, or view the Calendar of Events on the web at: www.archives.gov/calendar.  

Marvin Kalb is a James Clark Welling Presidential Fellow at The George Washington University and Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is also a contributing news analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News Channel. In addition, he is frequently called upon to comment on major issues of the day by many of the nation's other leading news organizations.

Kalb had a distinguished 30-year broadcast career, working for both CBS News and NBC News, where he served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and moderator of Meet the Press. Among his many honors are two Peabody Awards, the DuPont Prize from Columbia University, the 2006 Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club and more than a half-dozen Overseas Press Club awards. He has lectured at many universities, here and abroad. Kalb was the founding director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

A graduate of the City College of New York, Kalb has an M.A. from Harvard and was zeroing in on his Ph.D. in Russian history when he left Cambridge in 1956 for a Moscow assignment with the State Department. The following year, he joined CBS News, the last correspondent hired by Edward R. Murrow. Kalb has authored or co-authored 12 nonfiction books and two best-selling novels. His latest book, co-authored with his daughter, Deborah, is "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama."