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Fall Maple tree

Since returning from my trip to Germany and Switzerland I have been spending a significant amount of time labeling my more than 2,000 photos and going through the various books, papers and DVDs provided to me by the wonderful hosts in my hometowns. I am so grateful that I sent emails home almost daily, documenting my adventures and including photos. Between the emails and my blog posts I have been able to identify most of the photos. Remembering the food in the photos would have been a big challenge without this help.

Rolf in Switzerland sent me a gedcom file of all of the Kubler names and dates he has found so far. (A gedcom file is basically a universal file format that allows you to share genealogical data between different genealogy software programs.) Theoretically, anyway. I was unable to get my software, Family Treemaker, to open the gedcom file, so I downloaded a free software program called Family Tree Builder. I think that is the software that Rolf was using, but I am not positive about that. With this free software I was able to open and import the file Rolf sent to me. The file contains 300 names, and probably more than 275 of those were new to me. The new names I then had to type into Family Treemaker so that all my tree would be in one place.

In placing all these new leaves on my family tree I was able to see the relationship between me and the cousins that I met while there. For example Josef and Susanne Kubler, who graciously had dinner with me twice while I was in Busserach, are my sixth cousins, once removed. How fun is that?

I am still working my way through the data provided to me in Insheim, Germany. I hope to finish up with that side of the family this weekend. Then I will concentrate on uploading my photos to shutterfly.com so that I can put together a book about my trip while the memories are still fresh. It will be a joy to relive the trip through my photo book.

Shutterfly photo books

This weekend I have been working on a couple of photo books. I love shutterfly.com because it is easy to upload photos and place them exactly as you want them within the book. I used to take my photos and put them into scrapbooks, but anyone who has done that knows it is expensive and time consuming. Once I found out about this online site, my scrap booking supplies were put away for the occasional craft project.

Our recent trips have all been the subject of photo books, so today I worked on the one from Montreal. I have to say it was not my favorite book to work on. The skies were so gray and dreary while we were there that I just feel like my photos are not worthy of a book. But I decided to put one together anyway, and I actually had enough pictures that I liked well enough to make it worthwhile. Unfortunately the memory card with Jim's photos on it is at his office, so the book will probably not get ordered this weekend.

I also have been working on a book documenting the history of our house. It is something I have had in the back of my mind for a while now, and I have been uploading pictures to the Shutterfly site as I have come across them. This weekend I did some serious uploading as I wanted to show the before and after photos as we have worked on the house. My gosh did we have a lot to tackle! When I look back now on all the wallpaper we had to remove, the floors that needed refinishing or replacing, the light fixtures, wall and floor tiles...wow! Good thing we were young and ambitious when we bought the house. Had House Hunters been around back then, we would not touched this house with a ten foot pole. LOL.

But looking at the old photos sure brought back a lot of memories. This is the only house our two children have ever known. A lot of laughter has echoed off the walls - more laughter than tears fortunately. The house is now 110 years old. What stories it could tell! I can only reveal some of them through the pages of my photo book.

This weekend we are heading to Cincinnati with my sister and brother-in-law for a Crusham family reunion. This is my mom's side of the family, and only one brother and two sisters remain of the nine children grandma and grandpa had. Each time I go to a reunion it seems that there is one less person in the group pictures. And I always wonder what will happen to the reunions when the last three siblings pass on. It doesn't seem like our generation is all that interested in large family gatherings. My sister and I make the trek from St. Louis every time a reunion is held, but cousins who live there in town can't be bothered to stop in even for a brief period.

Speaking of pictures, one of the many boxes I inherited when my dad died contains old family photos. I am in the process of scanning them so that I can share them with my siblings and other interested relatives. I first divided the photos up by family and created a bag for each of my three siblings. They mostly contain photos of their own families that they shared with mom and dad throughout the years. That was the easy part. The stack of photos I knew we all might be interested in I decided to make digital rather than making prints the others might not even care to have around. Scanning is a slow and tedious process, particularly since I feel the need to clean most of the photos up with a photo editing program.

I am not quite sure what to do with the scanned pictures when I am done. There will be too many to email to my siblings, plus I want the photos somewhere that my cousins can access them if they want. My Picassa account, where I post photos from the Missouri Botanical Garden and other public venues, has nearly 200 photos in it. Once you hit 200 photos, you have to pay an annual fee. I have a Shutterfly account where I import photos that I want to reprint or put into photo books, but I'm not sure if others can access the account or if they have to join Shutterfly just to look at my photos. I also don't know if any of my photos could then be downloaded by my relatives. It sounds like I have some research to do, which will take more time. But as I said, it's all relative.