Help Identify Civil War Photographs

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In the 1860′s while the United States was deeply entrenched in the Civil War, photography was beginning to increase in popularity and accessibility. Many young soldiers carried photographs with them throughout their travels, the photographs a reminder to them that their loved ones were awaiting their return.

Unfortunately many of the young men who fought in the Civil War did not return home to their families. The history books show gruesome scenes of the battlefields littered with the extinguished hopes and dreams of so many young men. What the history books do not show or mention is what happened to the remains of these men and the belongings that they carried when they died.

The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, is shedding some light on this subject. They have amassed a large collection of photographs from the Civil War, many of them gathered from fallen soldiers and saved in hopes of identifying the subjects. The Photographic Services department of the Museum of the Confederacy has preserved these images, many of which they have identified.

For more information, see the original article by Steve Szkotak for the Associated Press:

Civil War photos: Help sought to solve old mystery

More information is available online at:

The Center for Civil War Photography: www.civilwarphotography.org

Museum of the Confederacy: www.moc.org

Summer has come!

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Summer came early to Indiana this year! After an extremely mild winter, we had a very warm spring. Working in the garden this morning I recalled some of my favorite Indiana summer traditions.

  • Fried pumpkin flowers
  • Rhubarb sauce and pies
  • Summer baseball and the Colt World Series at Columbian Park
  • Summer reading programs at the public library
  • Gardening
  • Ice cream at the Frozen Custard

My great-grandmother fried pumpkin and squash flowers for my grandmother and her siblings when they were children. There is nothing more delicious and many people are not aware that the flowers are edible. My grandmother always had rhubarb in her garden and made rhubarb pies using my great-great-grandmother’s recipe (which uses circus peanuts in place of some of the sugar).

What are your favorite summer traditions and who started them?

Genealogy Books

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Have you been thinking about publishing your genealogy information?

Have you thought about putting together a scrapbook of your family history but don’t have all the materials to make one?

Would you like to put your family history in a format that will be preserved for generations?

There’s a simple answer to all of these situations: a photo book!

There are many sites where we can upload our scanned photos. Not only can we get inexpensive prints made of our scanned photos, but we can also get refrigerator magnets, mouse pads, calendars, holiday cards, coffee mugs, and my personal favorite – photo books!

Some of the sites from which you can print photo books are:

  • Shutterfly
  • Snapfish
  • Blurb
  • Tinyprints
  • Mypublisher
  • And MANY more!

Shutterfly is the site I have used, so that’s the site I’m going to talk about specifically, but I encourage you to shop around and decide which site has the best options and best prices for what you want to print.

Shutterfly has multiple options for photo books, including different sizes, different numbers of pages and different types of covers. You can create your book from a template or Shutterfly now allows you to create a custom book using “idea pages” to guide your design. The books start at $12.99 for a 5″x7″ book and cost up to $54.99 for a 12″x12″ book. The books allow for a certain number of pages and additional pages can be added for a small cost ($.50 for a 5″x7″ book to $1.50 for a 12″x12″ book).

When you create the photo book you can add multiple photos to a page, or just one photo. You can add text or various embellishments, such as frames, and you can also change the page background to a variety of different colors and textures.

Several of these sites periodically run specials, where you can get a photo book for a discounted price, sometimes up to 50% off. If you’re thinking about making a photo book, join the mailing lists for several different vendors and wait a few weeks to see where you can get the best special pricing. Many of these sites also give you free prints when you create an account.

Photo books are a great way to compile your family history to share with your family members without needing the amount of time and materials necessary to create a scrapbook or the expense of self-publishing in traditional book format. These sites also allow you to save your photo book so you can go back and update your books and make additional copies.

Genealogy Vacations

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An article was recently shared on a mailing list to which I belong. The article is titled “Following Our Ancestry Footsteps” and the topic of the article was Genealogy Vacations. As a genealogy buff, I love to explore the genealogy options available at my husband’s and my travel destinations even if our families never lived there. When I get lucky enough to travel to a location where my family or my husband’s family lived, you better believe I’m going to do some genealogy while I’m there! The article (link below) makes several very good recommendations for genealogy vacations.

The first recommendation is to know where you want to go before you get there. I do love to wander around on vacation and see the sites, but if you are limited on time you may want to gather a few points of interest before you leave home just to make sure you are able to hit the highlights. Before you go, you can research:

  • cemeteries where your family is buried
  • houses they lived in
  • churches they married in
  • schools they attended
  • businesses they worked for, etc.

The second recommendation is to create an itinerary. If you are only going to be in a specific location for only a short period of time, it will be important to plan your trip in order to make sure you have the time to see everything you’d like to see. To this recommendation I would like to add one very important thing: plan to have some fun! As a child, our family vacations had very strict itineraries and sometimes our vacations were more like active duty than R & R. Remember, especially if you’re traveling with your family, you’re creating memories!

Genealogy vacations give us a unique opportunity to connect with our ancestors. We can get a small glimpse of what their lives were like and what contributed to making them the people they became. Fortunately many of us have the ability to take genealogy “stay-cations,” a type of trip that has become popular in these times of high gas prices and uncertain economy. Taking a stay-cation basically means staying at home and “visiting” your own community as though you were there as a tourist.

If you live in or near a town where your family lived, take a day off work and go visit the sites, the hospitals where your family members were born, the homes where they grew up, recall all the stories you know about the family and write them down and take pictures of the sites that were significant in their lives. At the end of the day, enjoy a nice picnic or meal in a local restaurant, recount your adventures and be sure to have a picture taken of you and whoever makes the trip with you so you have a new memory for future generations.

Follow Our Ancestry Footsteps by Maryann Hammers

Free Genealogy Resources Online

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There is a wealth of genealogical information available online. Many of the sites that once were free are becoming subscription based and in the days of $4.00 gasoline, driving to do research isn’t always cost or time effective.

BUT there are still many ways to find information online for FREE. Here are a few sites that I use:

  • USGenWeb – Of course I have to plug my project first! The USGenWeb is a huge network of amazing volunteers making genealogy available online free of charge. Some counties are more active than others, but it’s a great place to start your research.
  • HeritageQuest – Many public libraries have access to a system called HeritageQuest. It can be accessed through your public library website by entering the barcode number from your library card. The site has tons of book and also many census records.
  • Ancestry.com – YES- Ancestry.com! Many public libraries have a subscription to Ancestry so if you access the internet through their computers or through their wireless networks you will be automatically logged in to Ancestry and be able to browse their collections for free.
  • Familysearch.org – The LDS website at familysearch.org has a huge amount of information available. Unfortunately with their new interface the search capabilities are fairly poor, but if you have the patience to shuffle through all the irrelevant search results you may be surprised by what you can turn up!

Don’t forget our grandmother’s old adage – Don’t believe everything that you hear! With genealogy, the same adage applies – Don’t believe everything that you read! If the information is not documented, it’s probably not accurate.

More on that subject later!

Does anyone else have a great free genealogy resource they’d like to share?

Welcome to the Indiana GenWeb CC Blog!

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My name is Lena H. and I am the County Coordinator (CC) for the Clinton County, Indiana GenWeb site! I have never had a blog before, so this is a whole new experience for me! I hope to use this blog to share information about genealogy (particularly Indiana genealogy) and to offer encouragement to other researchers!

A little about me: I have always been interested in family history and became involved in genealogy research around 1999. I did some volunteer work for the Montgomery County, Indiana GenWeb site and volunteered for the Tippecanoe County Historical Association (TCHA) in the early 2000′s. In 2004 I became the County Coordinator for Clinton County and have held that position ever since. I am also on the USGenWeb Election Committee, a post I began in January of 2012.

I welcome any suggestions anyone might have!