Wisteria

Pictured above is little George Seibert when he was about three months old. Below that is one of his birth announcements and the envelope it came in addressed to a family member. George Marcellous Seibert was born 12 February 1916 to Herbert Seibert and his wife Mary Rowlee. Mary was the daughter of George Rowlee and Mary Carr. The family lived in various places including Ellicottville, NY, Washington, PA, Bridgeport, IL and Ft. Worth, TX. Notice the pink ribbon? Believe it or not, pink was the color for boys back in the day! Yep, start here for information on when girls started wearing pink in an article by Smithsonian . There's also a nice photo gallery at this website. Wikipedia's article on the color pink mentions that pink was "first established as a female gender identifier in the 1940s" and points to a publication from June 1918 stating "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys and blue for the girls." Both articles make reference to aut...

אֶבֶן  הָעֶזֶר (The word Ebenezer in Hebrew characters) A while back, I was exchanging information with a fellow researcher on the Neamon family. This researcher related that John Henry Neamon immigrated to the United States from Germany in the year 1870 and settled in Ebenezer, New York. It was also said that he had a brother there. John Henry later moved to the town of Yorkshire in Cattaraugus County. I did an internet search for “Ebenezer, New York” to see what I could find out where it was. To my surprise, I found that it was in Erie County near the town of West Seneca. The word Ebenezer, by the way, is Hebrew for “stone of help.” According to http://www.westseneca.com/history.html over eight hundred Germans, known as the Community of True Inspiration (or Ebenezers), immigrated to America between April 1843 and October 1845. They purchased 5,000 acres of the Buffalo Creek Reservation (vacated by Indians) at $10.50 an acre. These immigrants established four ...

Back in September of last year, I had the opportunity to tour a cemetery. I even had to buy tickets for this. I was very excited, but realize that not everyone would jump at such a chance. I bought two tickets but wound up selling one to someone else the day of the tour because I couldn’t find any family or friends as eager as I was to take this trip. (I do know there are other genealogists and history buffs out there that would have been as enthusiastic about it as I was.) Forest Lawn Cemetery  is a fascinating historical place. The cemetery occupies over 250 acres (I walked about three miles total on the tour but didn’t see everything) and contains the remains of some historical and noteworthy individuals such as President Millard Fillmore, Dorothy Goetz the first wife of Irving Berlin , Rick James, and Barbara Franklin the mother of singer Aretha Franklin . I took a lot of photographs of various stones, monuments and mausoleums. I even got the chance to see some...