from Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak

I’ve written about them before, but if you haven’t checked out these websites, you may be missing out on one of your family’s orphans!

Marge Rice, Photo-Rescuer Extraordinaire
In case you’re not familiar with Marge, she gathers orphan photos at flea markets, antiques stores, and so forth, and returns them to family members. On 11 July (drum roll, please), she reunited photo number 1,000 with its family of origin. So far, a remarkable 744 strangers have been the recipients of her generosity. Marge rescued her first photo on 9 September 2000, so that’s an average of more than fourteen photos per month. How’s that for a serious impact by a single individual? By the way, if you want to keep an eye on Marge’s progress over time, bookmark the Marge-O-Meter.

DeadFred, One of the Coolest Sites on the Internet
I’ve always been a fan of Joe Bott and the gang at DeadFred, a terrific photobase site (that is, a database of photos) where anyone can post or search for family photos (now more than 60,000!). This family-based operation got into the rescue sport a little later than Marge, but if you visit the site right now, you’ll see that it reports an impressive 924 rescues. Here’s a little known secret: that figure tends to lag slightly behind the actual count. So I checked in the other day and learned that rescue number 940 had just occurred! Not too shabby, eh? Continue reading →

Credit Reports and Social Security Statements
We all spend a lot time trying to flesh out the lives of our ancestors by hunting down every little detail we can find in censuses, birth records, or city directories. I have been trying to create my very own “ancestor” detail for myself. I am filling up my software database entry with all the residences and occupations I have had. I found myself trying to recall some of my street addresses –I have lived in approximately nineteen places in my life. I then recalled that I had received a free credit report in the mail and listed were six of those addresses!

In addition, I like to use my annual Social Security statement to recall some of my earliest salaries. It makes a fun detail to show how much I made my first year out of college!

For more information on how to obtain a free credit report, you can visit https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp or http://www.ftc.gov for more information.

Susan Daily
Missouri Continue reading →

Contributed by Wanda Bradley
Sylvester and Mary Owsiany, who come to this country in 1906. The children are Raymond and Sophie Owsiany. The picture was taken in Philadelphia, Pa. after they arrived.
 

 Click on the image to enlarge it.

Contributed by Joyce Collins
Joyce’s parents, Mable Irene Henderson and Donald Eugene Markert at their wedding, 24 Apr 1929 in West Springfield, Massachusetts.
 

Upload photos of your favorite ancestors, and you could win an unforgettable trip to their homeland. Visit Ancestry.com anytime between September 1 and September 30, upload up to five photos a day of earlier generations* of your family, and you could win an all-expense paid† trip to visit any of your ancestors’ place of origin. Register, start your tree and upload photos absolutely free. You’ll be able to learn first-hand details about their lives and their homeland that may give you a better picture of who they were, and maybe a little about yourself as well – information you can’t get from traditional research.

In addition to the grand prize trip, each week we’ll also choose ten winners for additional prizes. Two first place winners will win a portable scanner, perfect for digitizing family photos for your album. Four second place winners will receive a free year subscription to Ancestry.com. And four third place winners will receive a personalized and unique copy of Our Name in History, a book detailing the history of their family name!

For more information, click here.

*Limit of 5 photo uploads per day. Please see Official Rules for photo eligibility requirements
†See Official Rules for details