Happy Friday!

Hi!

It’s Friday! Can’t believe I’ve been here 3 ½ days already. It’s gone by so fast.

Boy was it rough waking up this morning. Guess things are catching up with me. So tonight I actually stayed in and did some class homework for one of my BYU classes. I listened to the Sox game on the radio…they won 5-4. So what is this??? They win Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Friday night and lose Thursday night when I am there! Well, going to give them another chance on Sunday night. Game is at 7:05. I’m switching hotels to one in Oak Brook, so I have to find out where I can catch the train again.

Today was German Genealogy Day for me! And boy did I get my fill! The one primary requirement of German genealogical research is that you definitely need to know which town your ancestor came from. Most records are local. Good thing I know that Johann Schramm, my great-great-grandfather, was from Redwitz am der Rodach, Bavaria and his wife, Barbara Schwemmlein, was from Gundelsdorf, Bavaria. Even have their parents’ names…Johann and Kunigunde Kohles Schramm and Adam and Katharine Predinger Schwemmlein. Now to find out more!

The first session was Beginning German Genealogy. It was good to hear the basics again, plus he gave a list of good sources.

The second session was entitle German Migration to America. That was more in depth in the passenger lists and migration paths the Germans took, and where they went. I have already found that Barbara, Maria Anna (my great-grandmother) and Maria Edna Schramm, Johann’s younger sister, came over in 1887 through Baltimore. But Johann was not with them. I haven’t been able to find him yet. So I need to look some more and more and more!

Third session was German Ahnentafels or Ancestor Tables. There are thousands of reels of microfilm at Archives in Maryland that are files found during WWII of the proofs of German descent for SS officers. It is estimated close to 240,000 individual files containing anywhere between 31 and 63 ancestors back to 1800 at least! The officers had to prove they were of Aryan extraction. Medical histories are also with the tables. I know Johann Schramm’s obit says he had a surviving brother, Franz, in Germany in 1925, so there may be some value in looking for these files. Maybe other Schramms and Schwemmleins, Kohles and Predingers could tie in as well. That would be a find! But it would also mean I had SS officers in the family.

Lunch was low-key as I just grabbed another sandwich like Wednesday and some fruit and came upstairs and ate. Plus I sorted out that big stack of stuff I have accumulated over the conference…I have a lot of reading to do!

The afternoon started with another Roundtable Forum, this one being…yep…German. It was a question and answer session that covered a wide range of topics.

The last session was the best yet! The Keynote speaker from Wednesday presented the topic Problem Solving in the Passenger Lists. Dr Colletta is a very energetic and animated speaker. The hour + went by quickly and I have pages of notes. He gave many sources to check as well. He said there is a project ongoing out of BYU to digitize for the internet the various lists from the departure ports in Europe. So if you can’t find in the US lists when they arrived, you could check the various departure port lists, add some weeks for the voyage and then look in the arrivals for the ship and date. Many problems of not finding comes from the indexing. They are in the lists, but names could be spelled wrong or different.

Went for a walk after class…got cold and came back. It is chilly here today, probably mid 60’s if that. I know it is about 54 out right now at 10:45. I ate supper at the hotel restaurant. I wanted some fish and they had Broiled Tilapia on the menu. Sounded good. But they also had a buffet for $2 more that had the tilapia, chicken, clam chowder, salads, veggies, and all the makings for a killer Greek salad…anchovies as well! So I got the buffet and lucked out when the dessert was a bourbon laced pecan pie. Damn that was good! Everything was good! Even the clams in the chowder were tender and not like rubber.

So now I am looking for an early evening and a bright morning tomorrow. Can’t believe tomorrow is the end!

I haven’t kept up too much with the news. I did see about Zarqawi still being alive when they found him. I guess he did have some suffering to go through before he took his exit.

The World Cup started today. I see Germany beat Costa Rica and Ecuador beat Poland. Not the cream of the crop matches as yet! I think they said the US plays on Monday against Czech Republic.

For the past few weeks, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading two other on-line weblogs. Of course they are Catholic in nature, but they are very down-to-earth and easy to read. Both are done by guys in their early 20’s--one from Philadelphia and one from Michigan. Rocco Palmo writes Whispers in the Loggia www.whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com and Thomas Peters does American Papist www.americanpapist.com/blog.html. I really think these guys are bringing a lot of the fallen-away younger people back to the church and it seems like these younger ones are more conservative in their beliefs. Yay!

Well, enough for now. Let’s see if this will post. My wireless connection has been extremely slow this evening.

TTFN

Mark