Short form Research Plan

I needed a plan to help me zero in on some specific gaps in my tree. My short form research plan is designed to help me isolate possible sources for each gap so that I can try to do a thorough search for each item and briefly record the results. This should help me organize these loose ends and keep me from redundant research.  (I hope.) There will probably be revisions to the form but this looks like a good place to start.

Research Plan (short)

Person	Seeking	Resources	Begun	Done	Result
Marianna Jaskowiak	Birth & Brother August 1849 Marriage 1867	LDS films Iwno 1199965 1199966
Nepomuceno Sip	Birth date Parents	LDS films Grabow 719471 719472
Magdalena Kaczmarek	Village Birth date Parents	Geneteka My Heritage??

Respect Your Audience – a minor rant

I’ve been watching tutorials for MS Movie Maker. A few of them are produced by Microsoft; but many are produced by user gurus and wannabe gurus. I classify some as “wannabes” because while their knowledge of the product is very good, their presentation skills, well, just plain suck.  Has our culture become so casual that a sloppy presentation manner is thought to be acceptable? 

One individual has produced several Movie Maker tutorials.  I’ve watch two of them and the video presentation is good; but I won’t watch any more of his work because of his careless and unedited narrative.

He burps. He sniffs. It even sounds like he blows his nose. UGH!!!  I can’t listen to him. This man is a social moron! (I did say it is a rant.)

I know that there are many tutorials on many subjects that are very well done by user gurus so I’m not condemning them all  Just the few who have no respect for others.

<<End of Rant>>

And I did manage to get my two StoryPress stories converted to YouTube videos.

War Baby on YouTube

https://youtu.be/B6nAXnUwd88

Schipp in Prussian Poland

https://youtu.be/ec4UMAIaU6w

Story Interrupted.

My favored family story platform, StoryPress.com seems to have gone belly-up. It was VERY user friendly and FREE. Easy to upload videos or photos and add narration. I discovered it when Thomas MacEntee announced he’d done a story about his mother.   This was shortly after I’d struggled to produce my first YouTube video.

I was amazed at the simplicity of StoryPress. It is disappointing that the site will be shut down at the end of September.  Apparently the venture was not profitable. They say they’ll review their business model to see if they can come up with revisions that will make it work for them.  I hope they are successful.

The good news is that I was able to download backup copies of my stories; and that the backup consists of separate image and audio files. I won’t have to start from scratch.

The goal is to create a history in an appealing contemporary format. What is the likelihood that my kids and grandkids would read it in a book?  Small. So multimedia is my choice.

A year ago my impatience led me to give up on Microsoft’s Movie Maker because it is not intuitive – at least to me. But I’m going to try it again after watching a couple of tutorials. (When all else fails, read the instructions.) It’s always a bit frustrating trying to learn new software but I’ll give it a go.

I’ll be redoing the stories I had on StoryPress and posting them on YouTube.  They are “War Baby” and “The Shipp Family in Prussian Poland”.  Then I’ll resume work on the next story about crossing the Atlantic as a passenger in steerage in the 1880s.

Back to the drawing board.

Partitions Wars and Partitions

There was a lot going on in Poland during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Power brokers were busy waging war, making and breaking treaties, and redrawing national borders.

My third great grandfather, Johann Ganas was born in 1779 the village of Czerlejno in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth just after it had come under Russian control.  Johann’s son Adalbert was born in that very same village – probably on the very same plot of land, and perhaps even in the same house – in 1810 but Adalbert was born in Prussia. Here’s what was happening in the 32 years between Johann’s birth and the birth of his first son.

1772		First Partition of Poland - The Polish-Lithuanan commonwealth becomes a protectorate of the Russian Empire
1779			Johann Ganas	Birth
1790		The Polish-Lithuanian and Prussian alliance was a mutual defense alliance signed on 29 March 1790 in Warsaw between representatives of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Prussia. It was signed in the brief period when Prussia was seeking an ally against either Austria or Russia, and the Commonwealth was seeking guarantees that it would be able to carry out significant governmental reforms without foreign intervention.
1791		The Constitution of 3 May, 1791 (Polish: Konstytucja 3 maja) was adopted by the Great Sejm (parliament) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a dual monarchy comprising Poland and Lithuania.
1792		The Polish–Russian War of 1792 (also, War of the Second Partition,[3] and in Polish sources, War in Defence of the Constitution (Polish: wojna w obronie Konstytucji 3 maja)[4]) was fought between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on one side, and the Targowica Confederation (conservative nobility of the Commonwealth opposed to the new Constitution of 3 May 1791) and the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great on the other
1793		The 1793 Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the second of three partitions (or partialannexations) that ended the existence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by 1795.
1794		The 1794 Greater Poland Uprising (Polish: Powstanie Wielkopolskie 1794 roku) was a military insurrection by Poles in Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) against Kingdom of Prussia which had taken possession of this territory after the 1793 Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
1795		The Third Partition of Poland (1795) was the last in a series of the Partitions of Poland of the land of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth among Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the Russian Empire which effectively ended Polish–Lithuanian national sovereignty until 1918.
1803			Johann Ganas	Marriage
1806		The 1806 Greater Poland Uprising was organized by General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski to help advancing French forces underNapoleon I in liberating Poland from Prussian occupation. The Wielkopolska Uprising was a decisive factor that allowed the formation of the Duchy of Warsaw (1806) and the inclusion of Wielkopolska in the Duchy of Warsaw.
1807		Abolition of serfdom. Serfs were free to buy the land on which they worked, and to move from the Noble's estate on which they worked.
1807		The Treaties of Tilsit were two agreements signed by Napoleon I of France in the town of Tilsit in July, 1807 in the aftermath of his victory at Friedland. The first was signed on 7 July, between Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Napoleon I of France, when they met on a raft in the middle of the Neman River. The second was signed with Prussia on 9 July.
1811			Adalbert Ganas	Birth

Poland disappeared from the map, but not from the hearts of her people.  

Timeline of Polish history adapted from Wikipedia

Coming out of a slump

I’d finished a project on which I’d worked intensely for some time, and then fell into a mental abyss.  It’s as though my battery had died and needed a recharge - a mental time out in the dog days of summer. So I puttered around for a while, reorganized some files, got a few things organized into binders and played some computer games. At times like this it feels that my brain is filled with fog.

I made a stab at getting going on my next story – about crossing the Atlantic as a steerage passenger in the 1880s; but it got to a certain point and then stalled.

Thank goodness, the time out did manage to get me recharged.  The fog has dissipated and I’m back.

I’m working on a report to send to my cousins. The steerage story will actually happen. And I’m going to revisit some LDS microfilms to make sure I’ve not missed anything on them.  Monthly Indian River Genealogy Society meetings resume this month.

Back into the fray.