Wordless Wednesday

Another blogging community I belong to (Dogs With Blogs) has over 600 members. Several of these members have a feature on their blogs (rather, their dogs have the feature on their blogs) called Wordless Wednesday. They just post a picture and let it speak for itself. I didn't choose to do that on my dog Izzie's blog (rather, he didn't choose to have this feature on his blog!), but decided to introduce it here.

I'm going to do a take on this theme for Wednesdays, and, as long as I can remember and have time to do so on any given Wednesday, I am going to start posting a picture of someone I cannot identify. If it is only one person in the photo or if I don't know any of the people in the photo, t here will be no text. If there are multiple people in the photo and I know some but not others, I will identify the people I do know. The hope is that, if my cousins are still reading the blog and recognize someone, they will either post a comment to the blog or email me. Wouldn't it be cool if new cousins found the blog and identified people????

Now, without further ado, here is the first installment of Wordless Wednesday (other posts may be "Nearly Wordless Wednesday"), only today it will be Wordless Wednesday only from this point onward!

Back to Blogging

I have been away from my keyboard for a time while my computer was out in the shop (how's that for a sign of the times? It used to be our cars were at the shop). Anyway, I'm back for now with Windows XP re-installed and slowly re-installing programs that need it.

I attempted to join Miriam, Thomas, Renee, Elizabeth, footnoteMaven, John, Charlotte and Jasia for Scanfest today. I hope I didn't leave anyone out. I did manage to join for a bit and really enjoyed chatting and reading. I also appreciate the help Thomas and the others gave me in figuring out why my scanning program suddenly stopped letting me save scans to my hard drive. Once this was solved, I then started to scan in earnest. For all of five minutes before I realized that I apparently misfiled the pile of photos I had and did not put them in the "Finished Scanning" box. So instead of scanning I spent some time comparing the hard copies of the pile I was working on with photos already scanned in. Sure enough, I had already scanned these pictures (thank goodness I caught on right away!).

So tonight I was finishing completion of comparing the photos to the images in my computer. I soon discovered, as I was looking at the page of thumbprint photographs in "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer(WPFV)", that some of the pictures were not what the labels said they were. In WPFV, for example, a thumbprint picture labeled "Chugging" showed a picture of my grandfather McHUGH. Curious as to why I'd name t his picture "Chugging" since grandpa was not chugging anything in the picture, I double clicked on the thumbprint (or is it thumbnail?) to see an enlarged version. Low and Behold, the image that came up on the enlarged version was the correct picture of one of my dad's cousins holding a tub looking like he was going to chug it!

I was very confused at this point. I changed the name of this picture to "ChuggingWrong" (without changing the format extension of .jpg) to indicate this as a photo mis-associated with the label. When I changed the name, the thumbnail/print changed to the correct picture! The other, mis-associated picture moved downward under a different name. I noticed this same phenomenon with several pictures; however I didn't change the names of these ones as I did that with one other one in which the thumbprint picture changed to the correct one for that label, but the one that was mis-associated with the label disappeared! Needless to say, I did send an email to the computer guy who "fixed" my computer.

Now, to close on a positive note, I'm going to show some of the coolest pictures I've been scanning since July!

Edward HODICK, my father's maternal grandfather. I hope someday I can figure out how to clean this up!

I'm not sure on this one; it may be Edward again with others.
I believe this is a group of women from my McHUGH line (the paternal one).
I do not know who these are, but it's a great picture, isn't it?
I believe this is a group of McHUGH ancestors, too. I haven't cleaned this one up yet; you can click to enlarge and see some of the names "Joe" "Whity" and "Paul". I do know my great grandparents Dennis and Mary (GRIFFIN) McHUGH had a son named Joe, but I don't know about "Whity" and there was no son named Paul. Perhaps a cousin or friend.

Blog Help

Okay, I've done everything I can think of to get rid of that beige-ish section to my background to the right of the "body" section of this blog. I've changed the widths of the background smaller, larger, etc. When I change these settings in "template", and then click on "Preview", the extra section there doesn't show up, but when I go to the blog on the Internet as normal, there it is.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I'm using the "old" blogger for this blog, so there is no "layout" tab. It's driving me nuts ;).

I now return you to your regular blog programming.

Update: Thanks to Lee planting bugs in my brain, it's resolved. Apparently one of the posts' margins exceeded it's parameters and created the expansion.

And The Winners Are...

This month's edition for the Carnival of Genealogy asks readers to select award-winning posts in the following categories:

Best Picture - Best old family photo that appeared on your blog in 2007. Tell us which you liked best and why.

Best Screen Play - Which family story that you shared in 2007 would make the best movie? Who would you cast as your family members?

Best Documentary - Which was the best informational article you wrote about a place, thing, or event involving your family's history in 2007?

Best Biography - Which was the best biographical article you wrote in 2007?

Best Comedy - Which was the best funny story, poem, joke, photo, or video that you shared on your blog in 2007

For "Best Screenplay", the only nominee and thus the winner is: FURRY FAMILY, posted on 6 May 2007. This post was actually a follow up to a post from 23 Feb 2006 entitled "It's All Gone to the Dogs", but since this is a 2007 awards show, Furry Family wins! Why do I think this post would make a good movie? Because dogs always make for good movies, and what a fun story it would be to have the dogs of my ancestors' lives and the dogs of my life meet and explore life together

For "Best Biography" I had to cheat a little bit, since I didn't really have any biographical posts in 2007. I don't have many stories of my ancestors, unfortunately, so this was a difficult one to pick. I chose "Well Waddaya Know?" posted on 23 Nov 2007. This post describes a first glimpse, really, of the McHugh clan of Nanticoke, Luzerne County, PA.

Now, for the final two categories, I had to cheat. I could not narrow these down to just one post, so I chose the nominees. Readers are to determine which they think should win and post their thoughts to this post for the COG. When votes are in, I'll announce the winners. Sorry, Jasia, but these two were too much fun to pick just one (rhyme intended).

For "Best Comedy", I narrowed it down to FIVE posts, all of which will be linked to make it easy for you :). First there is th post from 18 Sep 2007 entitled "Forgive Me". This is the one where my ancestors did the square dance! Hopefully the video will work, as it wasn't yesterday and today I get sound only (Jib Jab was having problems). Then there are several posts from my Advent of Christmas Memories series: "Santa" from 5 Dec 2007 and "Grab Bag" from 6 Dec 2007 (these two are related and a vote for one is a vote for both; they win together or they lose together!). The third choice is from 10 Dec 2007 entitled "Holiday Travel" and the last is from 13 Dec 2007 entitled "Fruitcake".

Finally, the nominees for "Best Picture" are:

Maryann McHugh, posted in "It All Balances Out" on 6 Apr 2007.

Maryann McHugh, posted in "Thank You, Veterans" on 10 Nov 2007.

Regina "Jean" O'Rourke-McHugh, posted in "What a Find" on 30 Sep 2007.

Edward Hodick (3rd from left), posted in "Nice Matters" on 2 Sep 2007.

There you have 'em. The winners and nominees for the "Best of" for 2007. I expect to see lots of votes in the "Comments" section for this post to pick the winners of the Best Comedy and the Best Picture categories!

Another Great Photo

This photo came from my dad's mother's scrapbooks that I had re-organized for my niece, scanning the pictures as I went. The very project that led me to genealogy. On the back of this photo was the name "Anthony". We had an Anthony on my dad's maternal side (Anthony HODICK, 1896-1928). Family lore states that he died in a coal mine accident in Luzerne County, PA. Due to the death date, I suspect it mine have been the Baltimore #5 mine near Wilkes-Barre.

We also had an Anthony McHUGH (1893-?) on my dad's paternal line. According to his WW1 Draft Registration Card, he was born in Freeland, PA, lived at 1232 Prospect Street at the time of his registration, had dark eyes and hair, and worked for Carnige (I suspect Carnegie) Steel Company as a brick layer.

This photo has two main dilemmas: Which Anthony is it and which man is Anthony? Dad thinks it's Anthony McHUGH in the middle, but he cannot be sure. Both Anthony's would be his uncle, and dad knows more of the HODICK line than the McHUGH line. However, Anthony HODICK was known to have died many years before dad was born, so he has no first-hand knowledge of him.