Feeling Good Again

                      

It is always a challenge when good health is not part of the day, but I am feeling better than I have in about a month so today is a good day. 

It was good that I felt better today because I was asked to help out as a Primary teacher again at Church and also got to help with the music again!  I love Primary!  These kids are so cute. We don’t have many in Primary in our little South Philadelphia Branch, in fact there were more adult leaders/teachers in Primary today than there were children, but they are full of energy and answers and questions and corrections! Very fun!

Last week this little guy actually was sound asleep at the end of the meetings and didn’t budge until his mom came to get him.  He was so tired…..How could he sleep like that??

Monday morning came and I was feeling like that little boy and wanted to sleep all day, but back to work we went! So, I want to share a tender part of a letter from a Quaker father to his son who is away working which I recently scanned: 

I love the way this father closes his multipage letter.  It reads: 
"Son, does thee remember to pray each night to Thy Heavenly Father to guide thee and keep thee out of temptation?  Keep Him ever by thy side and thee won't go far wrong.  With heaps of love as ever, Father."

Then my favorite part......"Write soon tell me everything"

I love what we are doing.  I get to see a little piece of life among people who lived far away and far before I came.  They loved their families as I love mine. I love communicating with my family.  I want them to "tell me everything" too!

We have begun a different part of the project now.  The documents we scan are not in closed boxes anymore, but are in open boxes with individual folders for a family name.  It is more time to get the folders, open them, pull out the contents and get it ready for scanning, then returning it to the folder and move on.  We were afraid that this would slow us down considerably, but it appears that is not going to be the case.  We are getting into a rhythm that helps keep us scanning and moving ahead. 

We are happy that we have surpassed our totals from April (61,000+ images) to over 67,000 images for the month of May.  We are so grateful for our ability to continue improving in this work. 

I was given a tender mercy by the Lord last week.  I was feeling poorly and I wanted to stop but decided to continue.  The first file folder that came out of the box was the family name Baum.  I was surprised and humbled, almost to tears.  This is a maternal family name for me.  

I called my mom immediately to let her know about the find.  I won’t know until I have the time to seriously study the files if these Baum people connect to our Baum people, but they were all living in the Philadelphia area so I am hoping to find some connections although they will not be direct line because ours definitely came directly from Germany.  But, it was still fun to think that there may be a hidden treasure among the many notes in these files. 

Here are some examples of the condition of some of the records we are scanning now.  Sometimes the problem is bugs, but not very often.  

Mostly it is the quality of the paper. 

The paper often used was cheap but not good.  It falls apart at the slightest touch so trying to move it is problematic.  

Some of the records have been folded and the fold has detached from the rest of the document and is not always next to the page it is detached from.

If I can, I will spend some time finding the piece and making the scan as complete as possible. It's like solving a puzzle.

Of course my work area gets really messy when working with this paper. 

There are rusted paperclips that need to be removed, staples that have to carefully remove so we can scan all of the documents and any number of other creative ways these individuals decided to connect things.  

(We remove the straight pins so a researcher doesn’t get stuck while going through the pages.)

I particularly enjoy trying to scan pages that have been stitched together on a machine or sometimes by hand. 

I really loved this little book that was prepared by a genealogist to present to the family for whom they were working.

Another fun event happened at HSP this week.  Tara O'Brien (in the blue shirt below) is the Director of Conservation and Preservation. She has been working on a project to unroll some huge maps, straighten them out a bit and then reroll them in proper archival tubes.  These maps are huge and must have originally hung on walls somewhere. She waited to complete this preservation job until she had her interns there to help her.  It took all three of them all afternoon to get 4 maps properly rolled.

The above map is a map of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. in early 1900's.

This map above is of Philadephia proper as it was in 1902.  Very fun to see these.  We particularly enjoyed seeing the Transit map since Ed's grandfather, Frederick Phillip Frey, Jr., was a conductor on the old trolley's. Ed remembers riding with him on these trolleys before Grandpa Frey lost his job when the City changed to buses sometime in the 1950's. After that Grandpa Frey worked at a toll booth on the Pennsylvania Turnpike until he retired. 

I'm ready to discover new things this coming week!