Featured Saving family history- of OTHER families.

I've seen some others post similarly on this topic, but when you see others' family history docs or pics out there, do you pick them up and save them? I personally do. I know the chances are slim of finding the families, but it is obvious that someone wanted that data preserved, or it wouldn't have been written down in the first place.

I've posted it here before, but I bought a German Bible at an estate sale for $10. It has family data going back to the 1700s!!

 

Is the Marriages page an inlay? I ask because it isn't in German. It does mention people born in Germany.

 

I will have to pull it out and check that

 

Also, the right-hand side mentions people who lived in Baltimore, Maryland. But maybe they were born in Germany. Is there a title page in the Bible? That should at least show where it was printed.

 

To answer your question, yes... I'm a person who does try to find relatives of people who are identified in photographs or documents. With a large photo collection, though, I don't always spend a lot of time on that. If I can definitely identify a person in a photo through genealogical documentation, I go to Find A Grave and add the photo to the entry for that person, if there is an entry there. Not everybody is there.

 

Bible is definitely German and from 1873. Those other pages must be additions.

 

Somewhere a geneaology freak is looking for the information.

 

People often make additions to family information long after a Bible is published. Perhaps this one was brought to the US from Germany, or the people who owned it had family members in the US and added them in.

 

I love to do this too, time permitting… I hate to see family photographs and other documents split up, so buy it if I can if only to keep it together. I’ve managed to reunite albums with family members three times so far, and in one case the photographs had been lost during a house move and ended up on eBay… probably due to an unscrupulous moving company employee. Anyway, your bible is precious, the history irreplaceable! I love that you are doing this too!

 

Very nice to hear!

 

Did you find the families online? Locally? Other?

 

I have a Wordpress blog that I post to, some photos and enough history that would come up in a search engine, and I’ve had people message me saying ‘that’s my family!’. I find this more successful than trying to contact people directly through Ancestry, for instance.

A friend of mine found a medicine bag of old photos and documents hidden under some floorboards so I researched them, put them on the blog, and the grand-daughter got in touch with me! She travelled to see me and collected them. It was such a great feeling.

Keep doing what you’re doing. If you put things online make such you use all the words and names that people might search for .

 

I had several gold and silver jewelry items from a not so famous , but well known late master artist.
The grand daughter found some on my web site....and contacted me.
I was so touched that I sent her a 10K gold cast stick pin from her grandfathers work , free of charge !
Then her mother got in the mix and I showed her every piece I had..... at prices 25 to 35% off retail.

What followed were promises to purchase what they could afford........... months & long periods of no contact...... more promises.....promises of the family pooling together the funds to take all my items..... delays that included family illness ... family deaths from being shot....... more months of no contact..... promises of her boyfriend purchasing items for her birthday....... more long delays where I reached out , to no response .......and finally after more than 2 plus years of this ... shenanigans ........ I was totally fed up.

What got me the most.....all the contact from them included ..thanks for the grand daughters gift...what a great soul I had.....how wonderful that I still had the artists work, which they had so little of & was offering all of it to them, while taking it down off my site..., ... the G-d Bless you, the Jesus loves me ....ect ect...!

Years later when I put some of it up for auction......... I let the daughter know ... and never heard back from her !!

OK, so not photo's or docs or war medals............ but I went out of my way.... over & above , to help this artists family acquire .....pieces that they didn't even know existed .
One...all.... there was no pressure to purchase ..... they were the ones telling me how they would take all they could !!!

So......not every time one tries to reunite a family with items of a departed loved one ..... does it work out !!

 

That’s awful @komokwa . Some people are just out for what they can get so yes, you do have to be careful not to be taken advantage of. I’ve had a similar situation with someone persistently enquiring about a valuable Victorian album, so much so that I almost blocked him. But eventually I realised he’s just extremely enthusiastic and he’s actually been helping with some of the research. I’m hanging on to the photos though! The thing with photos and family history is I can generally confirm a connection to the item, so have confidence I’m not being taken for a ride. In your case, it sounds like the people were time wasters and playing to your good nature .

 

Through out my career I've had good luck and bad luck dealing with 1st Nations people.
I'd peg it at 65 / 35 in favour of the good........ but that 35% ...... what a bunch o' stinkers !!!

 

I purchased THIS fantastic 1920s/30 album full of great photos from a local seller for $20. She had no idea of its history and did not know the family.
I so enjoyed it, the main subject of the album had a wonderful personality that shined through all the photos in which she was depicted. Then I started online research based on a name scrawled on the back of one of the photos.
It took some doing but I eventually found Bertha's son in another state and shipped him the photo album for free. He was very grateful. (IIRC, it had apparently gotten into the hands of an Aunt many years previously, who ended up estranged from the family and who obviously held no great appreciation for the album.)
When I bought the album, I'd had no conscious intention of finding its family. But it wasn't in my possession for long before I felt that I should make an attempt to return it to its rightful place.

(I used a photo of Bertha as my avatar here for a little while, hence the title of that thread.)

 

That is so great! I can't even imagine how that guy felt!!

 

I bet that guy still does a piece of the Happy Dance every time he sees that album. I'm still hearing to this day about things I rehomed over a decade ago, often something I'd forgotten about. But the recipient didn't.

 

Once I posted an old photo to a Facebook group that works on reuniting photos with relatives (there are several groups like that). It was a picture of a toddler who grew up to be a dentist, as I recall. Anyway, one person in the group scoured Facebook and found a descendant of this dentist and suggested I contact the descendant. I did that. Eventually she got back to me and said she wanted the photo. I mailed it to her... no thanks from her, though. Just "I would like it" and that was it with no more communication after she sent her mailing address. At the time I also paid postage.

I had a happier experience with a wedding photo from the 1890s that I bought in an antique mall. It had a lot of genealogical information written on the back. This was in the earlier days before Facebook. I posted on a genealogical forum, and a local historian from the area where the people lived wrote back to me. He said he personally knew a great-granddaughter of the couple. He offered to be a go-between. I sent him the photo, and some time later received an extremely nice note from the great-granddaughter, thanking me for sending it.

I've also sometimes contacted relatives of a person, and they never replied. In one case, I did a lot of work to even figure out who the descendants were and what their current address might be.

So, mixed experiences there. One reason I do very little research on these now is that I have several times spent lots of time on research that came to nothing.

If I had an entire album, though, that would be different. I would feel compelled to find relatives.

 

Not photos but...
I once purchased an old autograph album from a local flea market for $1. It was full of cute poems/sayings/sketches, all dating to the late 1800s. Lots of full names were written so I was able to figure out the community it must have originated in, which was located several hours away from me. That tiny town had a small history page on their very basic website and my album featured the names of a lot of their original inhabitants.
I contacted the historical society person who sounded fairly enthusiastic about my offer to donate it to them. I sent it off... and never heard anything back. No confirmation that it arrived, no thanks.
Of course, I told myself that I wasn't in it for the thanks... but it would have been nice to hear anyway.