A Deep Dive into Dihles

For most of 2017, I led a workshop at the library called Writing a Profile of Your Civil War Ancestor, in which we took a deep and structured look at doing Civil War research and writing a basic profile of an individual.  We had our final meeting yesterday, and I'm immensely proud to announce that we have five completed profiles! (only one is mine 😏)  I promised folks would only half to write about two pages of text, and I'm the only one who kept it that short (cuz I wanted to prove it could be done.)  We read each others profiles and were amazed at the quality of the work we were able to do in just a little time each month.

OK, enough with the ad for next year's workshop on WWI...(although...it starts the third Saturday of January...)

For my profile, I've been working on Robert Henry Dihle, born 1837, one of my immigrant ancestors.  He arrived in the US from "Prussia" in 1857, enlisted in the US Army in 1858, served five years, including in the Civil War, and was discharged in Junction City, KS in 1863. He married in Junction City, and he and his wife moved to Salina, KS, where they lived for another forty years, building a successful harness shop, raising a family, and becoming quite active in the community. (You can find a more complete description of my research here.)

I still have a bit to wrap up about Robert, due to some terrific finds on a last-minute research trip, but I'm already turning my attention to where he came from.  During his life, he seems to have been quite consistent in saying "Prussia" when asked where he was born, starting with the 1870 census.  One problem, of course, is that the name "Prussia" means vastly different things, depending on the time period.  In 1850, it covered two fairly small areas east of Berlin.  By 1864, it covered much of what we call Germany today.  You can't do research on "Prussia" -- you need the name of a town, city, church, something more specific. I haven't found that in my research on Robert.

Time to spread out to his FAN club, specifically his siblings.  Many years ago, I received an email from a Dihle researcher in Detroit which specified six siblings:

• Heinrich Hermann Dihle, born ?
• Johanna Christine Dihle, born?
• Friedrich Wilhelm Ernest Dihle, born ?
• Auguste Wilhelmine Dihle, born ?
• Gustave Karl Wilhelm Dihle, born 1825
• Johann Karl Martin Dihle, born 1826

Gustave Dihle is clearly a brother.  I have lots of evidence linking him to Robert: 

• Robert sold land to Gustav Dihle in 1872.
• Cigar maker G Dihle is living with Robert's family in the 1875 census.
• In June 1875, Dihle and Harms opened a cigar factory and store. Dihle was described as a brother of RH Dihle in the newspaper.
• In 1879, Robert bought stock in a mining company in Rosita, Colorado, where Gustav was living.
• In 1880, he was listed as a shoe-maker in the census.
• In 1904, Robert's children George and Ida traveled to Colorado to help their ill uncle and aunt. The newspaper reminded readers that Gustave had been an early Salina resident.

Unfortunately, Gustave was even less helpful on place of birth...he switched from "Prussia" to "Germany" on his answers to the place of birth question.  

Johann Karl Dihle might be a brother.  It appears that he went by both Charles and Carl, and spelled his name both Dihle and Diehl.  Evidence for brotherhood?

• He lived in Detroit, Robert's first stop in the US.  He was the only Dihle or Diehl in the Detroit City Directory for 1858-9.
• He was listed as a "segar maker" in that directory
• He was listed as a shoe-maker in his Civil War draft registration
• I have Ancestry.com DNA matches with two individuals, both with trees, both with Carl Dihle as our only overlap.

Where did Carl/Charles come from?

• Prussia -- Castle Garden arrival record
• Germany -- Michigan death index
• Waddow, Prussia -- Ship passenger list (former residence, not birthplace.) As far as I can find, there's no such place under that spelling.

I'd call this a probable on brotherhood, but no great help on birthplace.

Heinrich Hermann Dihle, also known as Henry.  

• Best link to Robert is that a Henry Dihle was married in Salina, Kansas, and owned farmland in Saline County, KS.  
• Was never linked to Robert in the Salina paper, although he became famous throughout Kansas for a legal fight he engaged in with a neighbor over a strip of land 3 feet wide; after seven years and two appeals courts, they called it a draw and split the legal fees.  

Birthplace?

• Saline County Henry claimed Hesse-Darmstadt in the 1870 census.  Unfortunately, this is at least 200 miles from Prussia.  

I'm starting to think that either Henry's not a brother, or Saline County Henry isn't Henry the brother.

Johanna Dihle. I know nothing about her.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernest Dihle. I know nothing about him

Auguste Wilhelmine Dihle. I know nothing about her.

Obviously, I need to do more research.  

MHGS Digitizing Project -- Choosing Our Platform

We've known since we started the redesign of our society website that one of the purposes was to display digitized resources.  Unfortunately, we found that WordPress, while terrific for all our other purposes, wasn't really right for a digital collections home.

Why not?  Well, first consider what we wanted to do.  In our minds, a digital collections home needed to host a variety of digital file types -- documents, photographs, sound and video.  We needed to be able to attach a significant amount of metadata to these files -- labels with the people, places and things included, plus information about where the items came from, copyright information, etc.  All this needed to be searched easily from within the site and from Google.  Everything had to display quickly and with a minimum of fuss.  It had to handle lots and lots of files -- we have thousands of photographs alone.  And finally, we wanted it to look at least semi-professional, which we think will help convince local organizations to let us digitize their archival materials.

So what were our problems with WordPress?  First, terrible search.  Sorry WordPress, but it's true. The site searching capabilities are awful.  Second, WordPress isn't really set up to handle a database of images like we wanted. We didn't want to write individual posts about each photograph, which would take forever.  The album plug-ins we found were targeted more for art photographers, so the image display was lovely, but didn't handle the metadata we wanted to include.  And nothing seemed ready to scale to thousands of images, videos, documents and recordings.  We couldn't figure out how to make a WordPress option look professional.

So then we started looking in the archive community.  Once we ruled out the options we couldn't afford (PastPerfect), we were left with DSpace, Greenstone, and Omeka.  All three are open source programs, which means that the software is free, and targeted toward the academic archival market.

Greenstone was the first program I installed and tested.  At the time (mid-2015) it appeared to be the least supported and functional of the programs.  It was a possibility until we found something we liked better.

DSpace  is probably the most widely used among the big boys.  It actually seemed a bit too big for our purposes.  (Frankly, it intimidates the heck out of me.)

Omeka was kind of the Goldilocks product for us. Although it is used by professionals in the field, it is explicitly designed for those with very little technical experience.  There is even a version you can use for free without having to install it on your own website, although you lose some control.  It is actively under development and there's a good user-support base.  It's not perfect, but it's what we selected.

Planning a digitizing project

Our society has thousands of photographs stuck in boxes and file folders.  We decided we needed to locate them, digitize them, and put them in archival storage.  Such a simple idea.  Such a hard thing to do.

After almost a year of planning, we have finally started our project.  I thought I'd write up some of what we encountered -- perhaps we can cut some of the work for other societies?

The issues we had to address:

• What are we going to scan?
• How do we scan the items?  What kind of scanner?  What resolution?  What workflow?
• How do we manage the digital files?  How to edit?  Metadata?  How to display on our website?
• What is the impact of copyright and privacy laws and norms?
• What do we do with the physical items after scanning?
• Should we just scan the items that have been donated to us, or should we develop an action plan for identifying and acquiring/borrowing other items?

At the time we started creating a new society website, we formed a committee and had meetings.  It didn't work very well.  For this project, we had one person who pushed the project (me, the librarian,) one person who handled the technical issues, a group of regular library volunteers and patrons who acted as a focus group, and the board, who made the policy decisions.

For a project like this, I find it helps to start a "policies and procedures" document at the start.  At first, all you can add are the major section headers, but as you research and experiment and decide, you start filling things in, so it always reflects your current understanding of the project.  Ours is in a Google docs file accessible to the librarian, the tech guy, and the president.  At several points during the year, I have printed it out and distributed it to the board.

Sections so far:

• Overview -- our goals and some guidelines
• Process -- soup to nuts, from scanning to putting on the web to storage
• Photograph Scanning Standards (there will also be a document scanning section)
• Metadata Standards
• Copyright and Privacy Standards
• Contributed Items (policies about items we don't own)
• Appendix A: Julia's Notes on Copyright and Privacy 
• Appendix B: Resources

Book Review: The Invisible History of the Human Race

Wow -- what a great book!  I just finished reading The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally.

It's kind of hard to explain what the book is about, exactly.  Kenneally approaches the idea of genetics by starting with an overview of human ideas about inheritance, ancestry, race and genealogy.  In some of her early chapters, genealogists help the bad guys, and an in some of the chapters, genealogists help the good guys.  She looks at situations where an obsession with bloodlines leads to genocide, and she also looks at situations where the denial of ancestral information is used as punishment.  I learned some very interesting and disturbing things about the eugenic movement.

Then she moves into history of DNA testing, and the expansion of what can be tested, who is tested, and what kinds of things can be learned.  There's a lot of good background in here about the differences between deep history and recent generations, between Y, mtDNA, and atDNA, and between medical testing and genealogical testing.

One thing I appreciated was that each chapter explores one self-contained idea, while fitting nicely into the overall structure.  This makes it good for bed-time reading, and for making a topic this complex digestible.  I also appreciated the mix of personal anecdotes and scholarly research.

This is not, repeat not, a book that will tell you what DNA test to take or how to interpret your results.  It is, however, a good book for getting a sense of the forest of genetic testing before you start losing yourself in the trees of centimorgans and IBD vs IBS.

Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely, and highly recommend it.  And not just for genealogists.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Archive

This is a site that sounds dull but turns out to be fascinating...The National Institute of Standards and Technology (yawn, right?) is digitizing its archives -- publications and photographs.  And the photo collections include their collection of aeronautical instruments and testing procedures, appliance efficiency testing projects, a collection of atomic clocks, automobile testing, and photos of the 1939 project to figure out how to preserve the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.  I didn't have the nerve to view the collection of dental research photos.  There are pictures of crystals and glass plate photography and space beads and, well, they're up to more than 150 photo collections.

In short -- if you have scientists or engineers (or dentists) in your family, you might well find a photo of them, or of tools and instruments they might have used, in this collection.  And, as the Legal Genealogist is always reminding us, photo collections produced by US government agencies are generally copyright free!

Herbert J. Reed of the Electrochemistry Section measuring specific gravity on a battery

Book Review: Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

The last genetic genealogy book on the list!  Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA, by Richard Hill isn't really a how-to book.  Instead, it's a narrative about one adoptee's search for his family.

The good: This is a story with a couple of happy "endings," as Hill was able to identify both biological parents and develop good relationships with family.  The search starts in the days of phone calls and letters and ends with internet searches and DNA, and demonstrates the wide net an adoptee must cast for any possible clue.

The bad: Not to diminish Hill's work, but his case seems relatively easy -- it appears that he was just about the only person who didn't know, the adoption was handled through family connections as opposed to an agency, and only the government seems to have been trying to hide it.  A huge percentage of the challenge came from logistical issues caused by the passage of time, such as tracking down people who had moved or died, rather than outright secrecy or lost records.   And, it appears that a bunch of the work was done by other people, largely a volunteer with an adoptee support group.

My takeaways:  This is a huge emotional minefield, not to be entered lightly.  Adoptee support groups are really important.  And we really need to change the laws around adoption and official records; I find the idea of certifying a falsified birth certificate repugnant as both a genealogist and a citizen.

I would suggest reading this book as a way to prepare for the mental and emotional components of an adoptee search, but not as a handbook for learning techniques for conducting such a search.

Don't Forget to Look for Digital Books!

After receiving an email mentioning a 987 page (!) genealogy of one of my families, I was feeling sad that it's out of print.  Googling didn't find anything helpful, and WorldCat.org suggested helpfully that the nearest copy was in a library 187 miles away.  But...clicking on the Editions link in WorldCat brought up a list of 4 editions of the book, one of which was said to be digital.  And clicking on that brought up a link to the Hathi Trust website, where the entire book is digitized, searchable, and free for anyone.

Lesson: WorldCat.org is your friend.

And, if you're wondering, the book is The Basye Family in the United States, by Otto Basye, and the link is http://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89062852876

Oddly enough, while Google didn't find the digital version of the book, it did find a description of Otto's papers, which were donated to the State Historical Society of Missouri.  Apparently there are approximately 4 shelf-feet of materials, largely the research for the book.