51st Pioneer Infantry in the Library of Congress American Memory Collection

The American Memory Collection documents the American experience. I searched for the 51st Pioneer Infantry in this collection.

In the search box, I entered “51st Pioneer Infantry” and got only two results. So I tried “51st Pioneer”.

The results were:

There is a choice to download the pdf of the page or of the whole issue.

Be sure to note the page number and position of the article; searching in the pdf may not work.

The first result in “The Stars and Stripes” was:

The second result in “The Stars and Stripes” was from the The Army’s Poets column:

The third result in “The Stars and Stripes” was:

The fourth result was in the Serial Set. It was dated 1863, so it was not relevant.

To take this another step, you can search within the “Stars and Stripes” collection for the terms: 51st Pioneer Infantry. There are other results, but the terms were not adjacent.

Search the American Memory Collection for your ancestors’ military units, and see what you can find. Remember to search for other information about their lives and times in this collection.

The St. Mihiel Offensive and the 51st Pioneer Infantry

General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF)  launched the Saint-Mihiel offensive. This was the AEF’s first independent offensive, with an American Army under American command. The goal was to cut off the rail lines between Paris and the Eastern Front. The St. Mihiel salient was a fortified bulge into France that was 15 miles on either side of St. Mihiel, 20 miles south of Verdun.

The 51st Pioneer Infantry was divided. My Grandfather’s Company, B, was attached to First Division. They had their first experience with exploding shells, and enemy machine guns and airplanes dropping bombs. The Pioneers kept roads and bridges repaired and rebuilt. They were tasked with keeping the lines of communication open. Trucks were filled with broken brick and stone from destroyed cities and villages, and were prepositioned where enemy attacks were expected. As soon as a shell exploded in a road, the crew came and repaired it.

The map above is from “The War with Germany A Statistical Summary” by Leonard P. Ayres, Colonel, General Staff, Washington Government Printing Office, 1919.

St. Mihiel by the Numbers

• 1st Time American Expeditionary Forces were under American Command
• 1st Use of the term D-Day
• 7 American Divisions Advanced at 5 A.M. on 12 Sept 1918
• 1 million artillery shells were fired in the first 4 hours
• 1476 allied air planes participated in the greatest air battle of the Great War
• 16,000 Prisoners were taken in two days

5 Web Resources:

1. St. Mihiel Drive 1918 United States Army, World War I from the Official films of the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army taken in France. Note: This video does contain images of fallen soldiers.
   
2. Pershing’s Description of the Battle of Saint Mihiel [Excerpted from the Final Report of Gen. John J. Pershing (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), pp. 38-43 ]
3. American Expeditionary Force at St. Mihiel
4. The Library of Congress American Memories, Today in History: September 12 Saint-Mihiel Offensive
5. “The War with Germany A Statistical Summary” by Leonard P. Ayres, Colonel, General Staff, Washington Government Printing Office, 1919, Chapter VIII. Two Hundred Days of Battle.

Sending A Spouse to Rootstech

What if you can’t make it to Rootstech? What if your spouse is in Salt Lake City on business that week? Send the spouse!

I put together a binder for him to bring. It included:

• His electronic receipt for the keynote / vendor hall ticket
• A list of the vendors, with notes about which ones to visit
• His pedigree chart
• His line of descendancy from Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins

My guidance for him was to check out the new products, take pictures and check out the product offerings and special sales.

While he walked around the vendor hall, he sent pictures. He also called to see if I needed the items on sale, or needed more information. The calls and pictures really were the next best thing to being there.

He followed those instructions, and collected a bag crammed full of information, bags and items given away at the vendor tables. He clearly enjoyed his time in the vendor hall.

Perhaps he was inspired by the beautiful family charts when he bought a printer capable of printing 12″ x 12″ sheets.  He mentioned that it would be good for printing fan charts and other family history. Is it possible he is hooked?

5 Questions with the DC Metro Rootsmagic User Group Leader, Dr. Margaret Ezell

Recently I asked Dr. Ezell to answer a few questions about her favorite genealogy software program, Rootsmagic.

 

1. Why should a genealogist use a genealogy software program?

My biggest reasons for using a genealogy software program are:

• Good software programs like RootsMagic make it easy to share information. Some also have iPad, or Smartphone versions.
• The mistakes in my database are my own, and all changes are mine.
• I decide when something is proven, when I have enough sources, and who is related to whom.

There are two types of genealogy/family history programs, those that run in the cloud and those that run on your home computer. Example programs on the Cloud are Ancestry, FindMyPast, and MyHeritage. They are easy to share with others. Example software program that run on your computer (PC or MAC) are RootsMagic, Legacy, Family Tree Heritage, Family Tree.

When I use collaborative online family trees, such as Family Search, other users can change the entries. Example: My great grandfather’s name was James Reeves Watson, the Clerk of Court in Claiborne Parish, LA. Every document we have has his full name. One of my unknown relatives decided to wipe out his full name and put in just JR Watson. I had to go back into FamilySearch and put in his full name, documented. He could have had a nickname of JR, but my mother at 99 had never heard her grandfather called that. She had been very close to him.

The same thing happens when you use any of the online program and you don’t make your file PRIVATE! But you don’t want to make it private so you can find new relatives and researchers. That is the oxymoron for researchers! So have your own copy offline!

 

2. What genealogy software programs have you used?

RootsMagic (several versions including the latest: RootsMagic 7). It works with Windows 10, 8, 7, 2000, and Mac OS X

Broderbund Family Tree Maker

Legacy

PAF (Personal Ancestral File), which is no longer supported by FamilySearch as of JULY 15, 2013.

 

3. Why do you recommend using RootsMagic?

It works/synchs/searches/imports directly with FamilySearch and soon it will with Ancestry.

Later this year, RootsMagic users will have access to Ancestry’s huge collections of records and members’ trees. With this new association, comes the ability to use the hints (Shaky Leaves). This will be in addition to the Hints from FamilySearch and MyHeritage.

 

4. Is there a great feature of RootsMagic that people should be using and don’t?

There are several that I love besides the HINTS:

Color Coding people and lines. You can use the color coding to highlight those who want work on or highlight you problem people for whom you need more documentation.

Switching Views from Pedigree to Family to Descendants to People, WebSearch, Timeline.

 

 

5. How can participating in a user group help a genealogist?

You can ask your specific questions or ask for a demonstration from other members. A current example topic is: Help for moving data from Family Tree Maker to RootsMagic.

Each month our RootsMagic User Group tries to have a lesson of some type. Researchers new to RootsMagic 7 may have challenges learning how to enter source citations into RootsMagic, so I thought I would show how I enter a new source and then create a citation, with the Evidence Explained source templates, and with a free-form template (in a later post in this series).This past month we were going through lesson on Creating Source Citations in Rootsmagic 7 from Randy Seaver’s Blog at Genea-Musings. You can view these blog posts here.

 

About the Metro DC Rootsmagic User Group

The Metro DC RootsMagic User Group meets at Washington DC Family History the 2nd Saturday of each month at 9:30 a.m. except when major Genealogy Conference are the same weekend. Everyone is invited to attend.  After the RootsMagic / Ancestry announcement there have been a lot of new users, so we have gone back to a lot of the basics at the meetings.  We have a free-for-all question session after the lesson.

 

Margaret P. Ezell, Ph.D.

 

As far back as Margaret Ezell can remember, she was taken to research libraries, courthouses, and to visit family members to gather family history information. Margaret’s mother, Mildred Ezell – (who died in 2015 at 99 yrs. and 10 days) became a genealogy enthusiast more than 63 years ago. Margaret remembers at about age 9, going to courthouses in Georgia and South Carolina. “There was one bare 40-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling, damp walls, boxes of stinky old records, and bug parts in the basement room where Mom copied records (no Xerox machines then). We took our own lightbulb -100-watt. Mom had me copy records until lunchtime when the movie matinee opened and I ran like the wind to get out of the courthouse.”

Having stood with her Mother for 3 days at the copier straight at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Wilson Library Manuscript Room, she is now glad to have so many digitized online records. Her computer skills were used to train her Mom to use the computer at 70 years of age. She wrote more than 15 genealogy books that Margaret edited, formatted and prepared the text and photos for camera-ready copy for publishing. The books are all on her family – mainly southern roots – Corry, Brodnax, Watson, Cain, Seab, Swint. She and her Mom submitted over seven (7) thousand records to the FamilySearch.

Margaret has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Family Finance and has worked in the financial and information technology arenas for over 15 years. Margaret is a Seneca Stake Family History Consultant and one of the founders of the DC Metro RootsMagic User Group which meets the 2nd Saturday of every month at the DC Family History Cente

Google is shutting down Picasa

Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Google Photos

Yesterday Google announced that it is shutting down Picasa in favor of Google Photos.
Standby, the changes will begin starting May 1, 2016.

Here are your options:

1) Login to Google Photos and your pictures will be there.

2) If you do not want to use Google Photos, there will be a new place created for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. You can view/delete/download your albums from this new place, but you will not be able to create/organize/edit your albums. That means you will still be able to access them, but you cannot manipulate them.

For those using the Desktop Picasa application, it will no longer be supported after March 15, 2016. That means it will still work on your desktop, but the program will not be updated in the future.

You can read the announcement at:
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html