Moments in Time

Blogs which describe moments in my life, or the lives of my family.

Adapting to Modernity

There was good news and bad news when I discovered “Adapting to Modernity” by Heide W Whelan in the library. The good news, apart from the fact it is in English, was that it is the best resource I’ve found so far in my research about my father’s family. The

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Found Objects – Cufflinks

Amongst the myriad of objects I found when cleaning out my father’s possessions after his death, there were several pairs of cufflinks. Some of them, including an odd one out, are in the picture above. All of the cufflinks I have are known as toggle style, or swivel-back. This means

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Found Objects – Glass Negatives

Among the many photographs from my mother’s side of the family are a few negatives, including two of glass. A quick Google search and I found this website. Apparently, there are two principal kinds of glass plate negatives: Collodion Wet Plate and Gelatine Dry Plate. I’m almost certain the negatives

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Found objects – Images

Now and again I pull out one of the large plastic tubs which house the memorabilia I brought from my parent’s house. Much of the memorabilia is letters, documents and various bits of paper, written in Russian or German. There is not very much in English. If I ever have

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Researching Family History – the frustrations

Last year, I wrote this post about four ways to research your family history. This week I discovered the limitations of research while I was writing an essay for my study. The task was to write a short narrative on a person, place, time or event, using techniques based on

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Filling in the gaps

I have several genealogical charts of my father’s family. A couple of them comprise the entire family, one of them is only of my father’s direct family, and one of them includes the children of the females in the family. All of them contain valuable information; names, birth dates, dates

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