Too Busy To Post

I have neglected to post what I have been doing, so I will give a brief account.

Report on ordinances that our family has accomplished in 2016.

Initiatory and Endowment 32

Sealings to Parents 17

Couple Sealings 2

Baptism and Confirmation 163

Initiatory 35 (separate from above)

Endowment 9 (separate from above)

There are probably more, but I didn’t keep and accurate record.

Altgelt Stoltz file

See the May post for the Altgelt Family Tree

When I was in Germany 1997-2000, I put together a file in PAF, which I named Altgelt Frankfurt. I received some documents from Beverly Bennett, a descendant of Alexander Scoby Standley.  It was a mimeographed copy of a genealogy written by Axel Altgelt who lived in Buenos Aries.  His family emigrated to Argentina and then he came back and looked at the records.  The document was called Die Nachkommen des Johannes Altgelt Statschöffen zu Siegen.  A link to this document that I edited and placed on his record in Family Tree is provided here. The document contains photos that we took when we visited the area as well as the original document.  Axel went back to Germany in 1937-38 to collect this information. Appended to this document is a Descendancy chart that I prepared from the data entered into  PAF showing the connection to Alexander Scoby Standley  and Philinda Upson his wife who were the great grandparents of my grandmother Mary Ellen Kerr Gee.  Also in this PAF file are the Stoltz family from Germany who married into the Altgelt line in America.  The name Altgelt was changed to Outcalt, Outcault, Altcelt, Outcelt, Outgelt and variations of that spelling when they came to America. The Stoltz family name changed as well to Stults, Stolts, Schulz and variations as well.  With the help of Family Tree, I have been able to add names for ordinance work on both these lines.  

When working on adding sources to this line one day, I came across a name on Find A Grave.  The information was there, but no photo of the grave as is sometimes the case.  Being curious I look at the submitter and there was an e-mail address.  I sent an e-mail and it got me in touch with Andrew Outcalt.  He is also a descendant of the Altgelts of Siegen.  He and I have corresponded and he gave me access to his site on Ancestry.com of 24.000+ individuals.  In addition he sent me 196 pages of genealogy written in Spanish by Carlos Altgelt.  Carlos was born in Argentina and is now living in Michigan.  He wrote a book entitled “The Boy Who Never Grew Up”.  I saw a copy of the book when we visited Barbara Bennett in Preston, Idaho.  I have tried to get a copy, but it is out of print.  Andrew Outcalt sent me a file with some excerpts from the book and gave me Carlos’ e-mail address.  I have communicated with him.

I have been going through this information and comparing it with Family Tree and entering the data into my Ancestral Quest database. This database has 2,615 individuals and 857 marriages at the present time. My plan is to go through the data and add to my database and compare with Family Tree. This takes time.

There are Altgelt families that emigrated from Germany to Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States.  The earliest Altgelt is Henne Altgelt born in 1404.  There were bakers and priests (Lutheran) and even one Catholic bishop of Mainz, Germany as well a governor of the state of Illinois (John Peter Altgeld).

Butlers (the medieval kind)

I have been reviewing the Butlers of St. Brides (Sir John Butler 1285) and his posterity that lived in Dunraven Castle and updating the information in Family Tree and my database.

There are records on Family Tree that I have corrected on Thomas Lamrock Butler and his wife Dinah David.

Bailey

Because Penelope Bailey was not married in the church to Joseph Brown the pastor would not christen the children with the surname of Brown and they were christened with the name Bailey.  Thus, the children on my records have the middle name of Brown and the surname of Bailey.  They apparently kept that Brown Bailey even after they moved to Utah, but it did not go more than three generations.

John Smith and Phebe Gee

I have been working on the descendents of this couple. Phebe is a descendant of Solomon Gee and Deborah Huntley.  In recent investigation and comparing with Family Tree I have been able to add individuals to this database and straighten out the records on Family Tree. There was one child of this couple that I was missing in my data.  By corresponding with Jan Byg she gave me the name (Serena/Syrena Smith) and there are three records for her in Family Tree, but none list her parents, so now we can connect the daughter and have her sealed to her parents.

Descendants of Solomon Gee and his first wife Susannah Clark

I have been going down the descendancy tree along the Powers line.  Susannah only had one child Sarah and she married James Douglas.  They had a daughter Phebe who married Nicholas Powers.  One of their children was Reverend Aaron Powers who was a Methodist Episcopal minister. He later joined the Mormon Church but became dissatisfied and joined the Missionary Baptists where he remained until his death. In Politics, Aaron was a Democrat up to the time of the Abe Lincoln nomination for president. He then switched to being a Republican.

I added a number of individuals both to Family Tree and to my database. There are 12,858 individuals in this file with 4,281 marriages. 

Descendants of Lysander Gee

I keep finding new individuals who are related to Lysander.  This file is separate from Solomon’s although it contains some of the same individuals. There are 5,598 individuals and 2,361 marriages.  I did a study and found that 20% of his descendants were either not members of the church or had had their ordinances done posthumously. Who says that all the work is done for those of pioneer ancestry?

John Ulrich Stucki

Great grandfather Stucki hired Julius Billeter to research the Stucki family in Zürich and the neighboring cantons in Switzerland.  I put all these in my Stucki database.

In addition I have a Teilungsrechnung (a document detailing the distribution of the estate of a relative Frau Elise Götz - Brack, born in 1881).  She left quite an inheritance.  My mother got 38.80 Swiss Francs. I took all these names and put them in a spreadsheet with the ID from Family Tree.  I sent the results to a cousin Afton Bartlett who works in the Family History Library.  There were a few individuals that were not in Family Tree.  They will need to have their ordinance work done.

I have printed and bound the following documents.

Solomon Gee Descendants one Generation

Letters from Laurence to Alice 1958

Letters from Hawaii 1984-1985 from Pearl Gee

Surname Gee in my database

The Gee-Crouch families

The Ancestors and the Children of John Wright Clark and Myrtie Julia Cowen

John Wright Clark and Myrtie Julia Cowen and their Family

Descendants of John William Trussell

Journal of Marion Joseph Kerr 1892

Donated the missionary Journals on CD of William Erastus Gee and Robert H Skelton to the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU.

Where do I store all this infromation?

I want to be able to link sources to the records in family tree. It is easy to add a story if it is in word processing format, such as Microsoft Word, Word Perfect, Word Pad, or an e-mail, but trying to attach a PDF file to stories, does not work.  There is, however, a workaround that I found out about when I went to the Roots Tech conference.  One can put in a URL to a website and then the individual who wants to look at the document can block, copy and paste the URL into the browser and be directed to a website with the PDF file.  That necessitates having the PDF file on a website.

I have a website for the Lysander Gee family. I also have one for photos of the Salmon Gee descendants. In addition I have one for the ward family history class. I did not want to put information on the ancestors of my mother, Pearl Stucki, on the Gee website.  This caused me to ponder and ask, where do I store all this information?  

The answer was to create another website.  So I did and here is the link:  I got out of my comfort zone with this one, but it worked out reasonably well 

I am in the process of adding files from my computer to the website as you can see.  The problem that I encountered was that some URLs are so long that they do not work well in Stories in Family Tree. Also I found by experimentation that if the URL is entered in as a link that it comes up a a string of ****** and is of no use at all.  If you leave of the HTTP// or WWW from the beginning of the URL and if it is short, then copy and paste into the browser works.

Here is an illustration. Click the Link.  You will see how I added the entire 600+ page journal of my Great Grandfather John Ulrich Stucki as a link to his record in Stories.  There may come a time when PDF files can be added directly to Family Tree, but this is the best way that I have come up to circumvent the problem.

The URL for his PDF journal was too long,so I had to just add the URL to the Stucki page, which was much shorter. I assume that people will be smart enough to go the the file if I direct them in an understandable manner.    

So much for now.   

Anyone from Wales?

Today I found a site on the Internet for Welsh Mormon Immigrants.  It is under the auspices of BYU.  I found Thomas Lamrock Butler and his wife Dinah David and their son Job Butler and daughters Jane (my great grandmother) and Maria.  Since these records contained photos for Thomas and Dinah, I added them as sources to Family Tree.

I have been to the cemetery in Spanish Fork and visited the grave of Thomas.  Relatives have already been on Family Tree and added a number of sources.  Fortunately they gave contact information, which I did not have.  Now we can communicate and do cooperative research. Click on the names below to see the information.

Thomas Lamrock Butler 

 Dinah David