Thanksgiving - Then and Now

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, whatever happened to 'Over the river and through the woods?"

I remember sitting in the back seat of my parent's car driving to Grandma and Grandpa's house on Thanksgiving Day. It was not a long drive, maybe 15 minutes but the anticipation was great. I remember singing the song in my head wondering how long it would take to get there in a carriage and how would the horse know the way?

Grandma made the best dinners and I always looked forward to them. Plus I would get to see Perry and Eddie (Aunt Mabel's sons) and Butch and Cathy (Uncle Newt's children). I was the youngest but they did not seem to care. Sure Eddie pulled my ringlets one year and Butch teased me but since I was an only child it was great to be part of the extended Pahlke family.

All the adults and children were in their Sunday best - shirts and ties for the men (old and young) and dresses or suits for the women/young ladies.

There would be a bar set up and Uncle Sandy would be making cocktails for the grownups. We would take out the Chinese Checkers and all five cousins would play. I learned quickly that being the youngest did not mean I would get any special treatment.

Finally it would be time to eat. There was a grownups table and a children's table. Sometimes there would be additional people there to share our meal and they would usually eat at our table.

It was a very traditional Thanksgiving meal and I always ate more than I should. There was one dish I never tried... Mince meat pie. I never understood what a mince was and had never heard of that type of animal so I stuck with pumpkin pie!

It is important to remember and record our family traditions. I have many pictures of Thanksgivings and Christmases at Grandmas and I treasure them and the memories. My cousins will always be young in my memories,Grandma will always have that twinkle in her eye and my dad will be napping on her couch after dinner.

Now that I have my own family what is our family tradition? I am hosting "Turkey and Texas Hold'em" for our family and friends on Saturday! Not quite my grandmother's Thanksgiving.

BTW - my sister Mary was born when I was nine years old. She and I both consider ourselves 'only children'. Mary's traditional Thanksgiving dinner is pizza. Her husband Tony is an expert at creating incredible pizzas.

The Continuing Adventures of my eReader and Me

Oh that eReader of mine! I have been working with it for the last week trying to decide if I was going to keep it or send it back. At one point I was VERY happy I had bought the 'extra' warranty because I almost threw it against the wall.

Then I started thinking - why did I have to read books with it? That was when it became fun.

I am going to have a vendor table at the Florida State Genealogical Society Conference to sell my pet project "Everyday Genealogy - the Desk Calendar" and was trying to come up with display items. AH!!!! My eReader supports jpegs and has a 'Slide Show' option.

Since my friend Pam Treme and I will also be promoting our 'Technology Tamers' training programs I set about gathering jpegs. For Everyday Genealogy I collected the various jpegs I have for the calendar and the iPhone app. For Technology Tamers I went into our PowerPoint Presentations and saved various pages as jpegs (an option in the Save As feature in Powerpoint).

Within an half hour I was loading these jpegs onto my eReader and WHAM I had a slide show. The eReader has options for the speed of the slide show and the transitions. And best of all my eReader came with a stand. I now had a display for my vendor table.

So, what else is my eReader good at doing - besides reading books? It also has a web browser so I decided to set up some of my favortie genealogy websites (Mmmm www.everydaygenealogy.com) to help answer questions that may come up.

Last but not least, I did load some books - mine and Pam's. The eReader can import PDFs that you, the everyday person creates. Pam and I have both created Family History Books and Pam has created work books for some of our classes. Now we will be able to show these books at our vendor table without carrying them around.

So, I guess I'll keep the eReader - I may even read a book on it one of these days!

eReaders and that Calendar Project

A while back I wrote about my ambivalence towards eBooks and eReaders. I did download the Kindle reader onto my son's iPad but never managed to actually read the one book I purchased online. I later just ordered it from Amazon and read it.

Last weekend I was channel surfing and saw that QVC had an eReader as a TSV (Today's Special Value). While I was watching the demonstrations and listening to the testimonials from the viewers I realized I had to buy one. Not because I wanted to read the latest David Baldacci best seller electronically or because I really needed to cut down on the number of bookcases in the house. That was all too practical! It was those PDF's that are floating around my laptop, blackberry and other workstations.

PDF's have become the 'new' newspaper. Not only are genealogical societies cutting costs and using them to distribute their newsletters but the majority of old books I download from Google Books are in PDF form. I also PDF larger documents (e.g. pension files, family memoirs)so I can read them later. So, for 5 easy payments and the ability to try it until January 31 I bought it.

My new Pandigital eReader should arrive Friday or Saturday - about the time a semi will be delivering 2500 calendars to my doorstep. You might have heard of it - Everyday Genealogy? It goes on sale this weekend!

Birth of Everyday Genealogy

Everyday Genealogy
What are you suppose to do with all the notes and handouts you accumulate while attending genealogy meetings, seminars, or just surfing the Internet?

I had asked myself this question just after coming home from an excellent presentation and wondering where to put my handout. There was the pile of unfiled family documents. This would be a logical place, but they were in no immediate danger of being filed. I found another stack of papers; these were copies of magazines I thought might come in handy and print outs of websites I did not want to forget. As I went through the stack, I found so many great sites I started making notes for myself and friends. I realized I had to organize all this valuable information in some manner, but was not sure how or where.

Flash forward a couple of weeks
My friend Pam Tremé and I do technology-related genealogy presentations under the name of the Technology Tamers. One Sunday I was surfing the net and toying with some ideas for presentations when the proverbial bolt of lightning struck me. Could we come up with 365 genealogy tips? I opened Excel and started typing in the titles of some of our presentations and articles we had published. Then I listed the 50 states, 5 or 6 countries one of us had researched and the major wars and conflicts in U.S. History.

I forwarded my list to Pam and told her I thought we should put together a desk calendar with a tip a day for genealogists. Pam showed mild interest and said, “This would be a good project for you.” It appeared that this would be a solo project. The winter in Florida was unusually cold. So, for the next few weekends, I was curled up on the couch researching and composing.

When I had over 200 tips, I started to put together proposals to send to various calendar publishers to see if they would be interested in producing my calendar. I researched the ratings for Who Do You Think You Are? and found statistics about the explosion of genealogy as a hobby. Encouraged, I formatted my first spreadsheet with the topics and my first 200 tips. Days became weeks, and finally, I received the publisher’s responses—Thanks but no thanks!

While not completely surprised, I was disappointed. I searched the various self-publishing sites but none of them accommodated my idea for a tip a day. I told my family I was giving up on the idea and put my spreadsheet away.

What happens in Vegas…?
My husband goes to Las Vegas a couple of times a year with his brother to play blackjack and bond. This year when he came back he had an announcement; Bill would find a printer for my calendar. My brother-in-law’s company prints cards (hotel keys, phone cards, etc.) but not calendars. Therefore, it had never crossed my mind to ask for his help. I was now entering the world of self-publishing. Oh, and I was about 165 tips short of my goal of 365!

It has been a long four months since that trip to Las Vegas and I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about ISBN numbers, selling on Amazon, creating my own website, and even translating this project to an iPhone application. Pam has been there encouraging me, offering additional topics, authoring the ‘New Year’s Resolution’ tips, and coming up with the title!

Everyday Genealogy
While putting together Everyday Genealogy, I learned so much about military research, the formation of the United States, and historical events I never knew. When I open up the latest edition of Family Tree Magazine or Internet Genealogy, I can smile at a ‘new’ website they are featuring and remember when I discovered it and added it to my spreadsheet.

Everyday Genealogy will hit the stands (that is, be shipped to my house) October 20th. Will it be a success? Can I sell 3,000 copies? I am not sure what the fate of Everyday Genealogy will be but 2010 has been one year of research I will never forget.

If you would like to see the results of all of my hard work—that is, order a calendar—email me at everydaygenealogy@gmail.com. Or, visit my website at everydaygenealogy.com to see sample pages from my calendar.

Everyday Genealogy: Everyday Genealogy to be available on iPhones!

Everyday Genealogy: Everyday Genealogy to be available on iPhones!: "Just wanted to let you now that Everyday Genealogy will also be available as an iPhone application this fall! And I made sure that it will w..."

Lunch Boxes and Family Ties

It's back to school season, which meant taking Tori for her school supplies. This has become an annual ritual which many dread, but we enjoy.

Once we have checked off the mandatory classroom supplies it is time to find the perfect lunch box. Tori LOVES to take her lunch, she contends that the school purposely lies when it posts the lunch menu each week. There are always substitutions. This year's lunch box was the biggest one on the shelf and it brought back memories.

My dad brought his lunch to work everyday. Mom baked a cake every week, made his sandwiches and many packaged up side items and snacks every evening. In the morning dad packed his lunch in a metal domed lunch box.

Tori's lunch box was a thermal version of dad's metal lunch box, dome and all. When I questioned her choice (not very feminine) she said that the most important thing was that it would hold ALL her snacks and sandwich.

Tori's box of school supplies is in the office until next week. Everytime I look at it and see that lunch box I think of my dad and all the lunches he brought to work in his.

Pictures and Memories....

Pictures bring back memories of our youth and in my case of hours spent scanning them.

For the last couple of days I have been gathering pictures to include on Chuck and Shirley's new photo frame. Looking at them I remember vacations, family gatherings and hours spent scanning!

I did the majority of the scanning during some breaks in my employment and while I enjoyed not working a 'day job' scanning is WORK. Actually it is not just the scanning, but going through all the photo albums to find the pictures. In my case I gave up on the albums in the mid 1990's and started using boxes so that added another layer of frustration.

There is also the problem of getting the pictures OUT of the albums. I bought all those albums in the 1980's when the pictures magically 'stuck' to the page in the album. However, now in 2010 the pictures have become one with the page.

Another 'oops' I encountered while scanning was that no one ever mentioned coming up with a name convention! How many pictures can you call "Clayton_Smiling" or "Clayton_Crying" when you have 15 albums covering the first 10 years of a child's life?

So, as I go down memory lane looking AT the pictures I will also remember what it took to digitize them.

BTW - I will be bringing two digital video cameras and a digital camera to the anniversary party!