Tuesday's Tip: Ewald Pape's C-File

I initially requested the citizenship file (C-file) of my architect first-cousin-twice-removed Ewald Theodore Pape (1894-1976) from the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) back in early October, 2015, shortly after I had received Ewald's A-File (Alien Case File) from the National Archives.  Their index search (cost then:  $20) was successful, although it took them until February 8, 2016, to write a letter to notify me.  I ordered the actual file (cost then:  $35) almost immediately upon receipt of that letter, at the end of February, 2016.

Almost 16 MONTHS later, I received a letter telling me the file was "lost and/or missing."  However, I was also told they were "working with the records holding facility to rectify this issue through record reconciliations and auditing procedures.  This process 'finds' previously lost files every day, thus another Record Request in future could yield a different result."

Uh-huh.  They refunded the $35 - but a new Record Request now cost $65.  The cynic in me was convinced it was only "lost" because of the rate raise.

After reading in a Facebook genealogy group about the success some others were having getting records (and more quickly than 16 months) under the new fee structure, I resubmitted my request - and $65 - on May 18, 2018.

I recently received a letter dated June 7 with the records.  I was disappointed that my $65 only got five pages - three of which were the 1936 Declaration of Intent and 1941 Petition for Naturalization already available on Ancestry.com.  There was a copy of a case file computer punch card (pretty useless) too.  The only other item in the file was his certificate of naturalization (click it to enlarge):

Needless to say, I am VERY disappointed.  Even the copies of the Petition and Declaration are not as good as what's on Ancestry, because USCIS redacted some information - despite the fact that I sent proof of the death of Ewald's son (per the FAQ), and the two witnesses would be long dead and no longer living at their redacted addresses.

I was also disappointed because I thought the file would have far more in it.  I was hoping for information on exactly *why* he was arrested in January 1942.  The USCIS' image gallery for C-Files led me to believe there would be far more in the file than there was.  Now I wonder if the FBI has a file on him that I should request.

I guess the only other thing I got for my $85 ($20 search and $65 retrieval) was another photograph of Ewald:

So my tip for this Tuesday?  Thoroughly scour all the possible sources for your immigrant's paperwork (Ancestry, FamilySearch, and records at the state, county, and city level, and the National Archives) BEFORE you spend any money with USCIS.


© Amanda Pape - 2018 - click here to e-mail me.

Tech Tuesday's Tip - GDPR Compliance, continued

image from Pixabay / TheDigitalArtist / CC0

A little more on my efforts to comply with GDPR - the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect on May 25.  I first talked about this in an earlier post.

I'm still working on a more detailed privacy policy (elaborating on the one currently at the top of the sidebar), but in the meantime, I did find an e-mail subscription service, MailChimp, that advertises itself as GDPR-compliant (if you use GDPR fields in sign-up forms to collect consent).  I also chose MailChimp because others I respect use it, and because they offer a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month.  This should work fine for me with my four-that-I-know-of e-mail subscribers to my blog posts (no marketing or selling).

It took a little tweaking (like all of the holiday) to get it to work.  I discovered that it is best NOT to send my blog post subscription e-mail messages from a Gmail or Yahoo account.  It seems to be working fine with our Charter.net address, so I'm about to start them tonight.  If you subscribe to my blog (under "Follow by E-mail" in the sidebar to the right), and if there is new content, you will get an e-mail no more than daily at 1 a.m. Central Time.  If there is no new content, then no e-mail notice.

Besides sending from Gmail and Yahoo, there can be problems for recipients with those addresses, so I've subscribed three of my own just to monitor them.  If you have such an address and can let me know if you're getting the blog post update e-mails and they look alright, I would appreciate it! 

I do ask for your first and last name in the sign-up process.  That's because, with Gmail in particular, the blog post update e-mails are more likely *not* to be treated as spam if they are addressed to your real name (with the magic of mail merge) rather than "ABT UNK Reader."  If the latter is what is showing up in your messages and you'd like it changed, let me know and we can fix that.  I also enabled double opt-in for sign-ups to further protect my readers' privacy.  That, and a required reCAPTCHA while signing up, will hopefully turn away spambots and discourage other spammers.

As it happens, one of my four readers e-mailed me separately to tell me his e-mail address had changed, and he has already re-subscribed with MailChimp.  I'll be contacting the three other legit Feedburner subscribers and asking them to resubscribe.  I also picked up another new subscriber yesterday thanks to a blog post share in a Facebook group.  I hope more of you will sign up too.  Welcome!

And now - hopefully - back to some REAL blogging!


© Amanda Pape - 2018 - click here to e-mail me.

Tuesday's Tip: Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization

Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems

I attended a presentation by Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems at the Texas State Genealogical Society conference last Friday.  I was impressed with Lisa's knowledge and enthusiasm, and I've subscribed to the premium content at her website, as well as purchased some of her books and DVDs, which I'm sure I'll talk about more in the future as I explore them.

Lisa's presentation was called "Get the Scoop on Your Ancestors with Newspapers." Lisa showed us some "cool tools" for finding old newspapers.  I'm just going to talk about one of them in this post, the Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization.

According to its website, "This visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. The data comes from the Library of Congress' 'Chronicling America' project, which maintains a regularly updated directory of newspapers."  The site provides some great historical information about the evolution of newspapers in this country.

I use Chronicling America a lot, but was not aware of this cool tool you can use to find newspapers in a particular time and locations (and language).  There's a timeline slider bar at the top that you can use to slide to the era that interests you.  For example, here's how the map looks for 1887:

You can then pan and zoom in to a particular area, and when you click on one of the dots, you can see what newspaper(s) were published in that city or town at that time.  Here's an example for Stephenville, Texas, in 1887:

If I click on that dot, a red triangle points to it, and then I can click on (any one of) the title(s) that appear for that location and date:

When I click on "The Stephenville empire," I get the corresponding page from Chronicling America:

If electronic copies of the newspaper are available in the Library of Congress collection, this page will tell you (scroll down) , and provide a link.  If it's not available electronically here (keep in mind it may be available elsewhere), you can then click on the "Libraries that Have It" link to find out some (not necessarily all) of the libraries that may have that title in some format:

I'd caution users of this feature to also use WorldCat (for additional libraries that might have the newspaper), as well as to contact the library in question, to make sure they truly have the newspaper and the years you want.  Note just above that for Tarleton State University, where I work, the holdings were last updated in January 1988.  We actually have the newspaper on microfilm beyond 1917, albeit with numerous gaps in the early years.

In future posts, I'll write about some of the other tools Lisa showed us, as well as a cool way to use Google Earth in genealogy that she demonstrated before her talk. 

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

Tech Tuesday's Tip: Making Timelines with TimelineJS - John Pape, 1851-1945

I made my first timeline with TimelineJS using my blog posts on Saturday, and I just can't get over how easy it is!  So easy, that I made another one today, this time on my paternal great-grandfather:

This was pretty easy to do. You start with a Google Drive spreadsheet. TimelineJS has a template you can download. Here is how part of mine looked:

There are columns for dates (start and end), a headline and text, whatever media you are linking to, captions and credits, and thumbnails for the media, slide type (such as the title slide), and tags (you can have up to six).  The media can be can be a link to a YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Dailymotion, Instagram, Twitter (pic or status), Google+ status, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google Maps and Docs, Vine, or an image (such as one in a blog post).  You can also put a quotation in as media, too, with the HTML blockquote tags.

I'm using the media caption slide to create a link to my blog posts.  Only the start date and headline are required fields. I may experiment with tags (which can be used to create categories within the timeline) later.

Once you have your spreadsheet set up, the next step is to publish the spreadsheet to the web.  You want to make sure to check the box next to “Automatically republish when changes are made.” This way, you can add events (from later blog posts, for example) to the spreadsheet later, and the timeline will automatically be uploaded.

Step 2 produces a URL that you then paste into the designated box on Step 3 of the TimelineJS website.  There are some options you can choose from (different font combinations, for example, or for code for a Wordpress.org blog - note that TimelineJS won't work on blogs hosted on Wordpress.com). You then grab the embed code and paste it in your blog or website - and you have a beautiful timeline!

I like this so much, I have set up a separate Timelines page on this blog, to store all my timelines!




© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

Tuesday's (Tech) Tip: Using Pinterest as a Storyboard

I'm preparing to be on a panel presentation on "Blogging Our Lives: The Intersection of Social Media and Family History" for the International Society for Educational Biography (ISEB) conference in San Antonio, Texas, this Saturday, April 6.  I created a board on Pinterest for this presentation and am pinning links to blog posts and other websites that I'll use in my presentation.  I can also give the attendees the link to this board, and then they will have links to all the sites I use in my presentation.

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

Tuesday's Tech Tip: Archive of Americana database

 [I originally did a variation of this post for my library's blog, but I thought the information might be useful for family history research as well.  Many college and university libraries will let non-students/staff use their library resources, including computers, during certain times of the day or week.  Contact your libraries to find out their policies.]


Archive of Americana is a database to which many academic and some public libraries subscribe, in all or part.  It provides access to primary-source historical materials such as newspapers, government documents, and other publications.  The America's Historical Newspapers collections include issues from newspapers from all 50 states.  Many of the newspapers in this collection go through 1922, but my academic library also subscribes to a module through Readex, the provider of Archive of Americana, that includes the Dallas Morning News through January 1984.  Here's a brief demo on using this database for family history research - click on each image for a larger view:

My great-grandfather immigrated to Texas from Lithuania sometime after 1880, so I did a search (above) on his (unusual) last name and limited it to 1880-2012 (see the red box in the image above).

In the image at left, only five of the 132 results are visible.  Click on the "View all [whatever number] link in the bottom left corner (again, in the red box in the image).

This should (it doesn't always) bring up preview images from the documents that include one or more of your search terms.  If you see something promising, you can click on the preview or on the "View Article" link (see the red boxes in the image below).

When you find an article, you will find a number of tools at the top right of the page.  The "Article Bookmark" link opens a new window containing the OpenURL for the article. You can copy and paste this OpenURL information into another application.  The "Export Citation" link opens a new window containing a simple, text-only format of the citation information for the article. You can also Email the OpenURL link for the document.

You can zoom in or out, reposition the image in the viewing pane, view the full page the article was published on, and reset the image view to the default.  You can also open the article as a PDF, open it in a print-friendly view, and maximize (or minimize) the image view pain.

You can also add the article to "My Collection," a temporary saving space that's held until you log off.

Your search term(s) will be highlighted in yellow. There is a check box at the top left of the screen to toggle that feature on or off. 

The database has a very informative "Help" page that explains all of its features.

Give this database a try for your pre-1922 ancestors, as well as Texas family through 1983.  I was expecting to find my grandfather's cousin who lived in the Dallas area (and I did).  I did not expect to find this article (pictured left) about my grandfather, who never lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, but only in Houston and Austin!

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.