The Computer Corner

Number 20, February, 2003. Republication of this article requires prior approval from the author. This and previous Computer Corner Articles can be found at www.northstarchaper.org

The North Star Chapter Website has been re-written and is still undergoing updates and upgrades. Please use it as a means of keeping up on the current events if your newsletter gets lost. It’s also a good way to share some of our activities (past and present) with friends and relatives elsewhere around the country.

http://istg.rootsweb.com/ is a website dedicated to ships manifests and put there by the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild. I’ve only recently started to look at the listing but it’s got some good information. I encourage anyone that is looking for ships records to start here.

Here's a helpful web site page described in the latest issue of the Polish Genealogy on-line newsletter, Gen Dobry. This page describes and interprets the various markings and annotations you often find on a passenger arrival manifest for your ancestors entering the United States of America. This page is particularly important and authoritative because the author is Marian L. Smith, historian of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Enjoy. http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/manifests/”

http://www.angelfire.com/ks/gerrus/index.html is another passenger list site.

From a listserv, I find the discussion of something I have heard of but never participated in one. Do you recall a "charivari* OR "shivaree"?

From the website http://www.autopen.com/muffin.shtml comes the following

passage:

The holding of a Charivari was a typical Canadian custom. The young men in the community who had not been invited to the wedding got up for the entertainment of the guests, the discordant notes obtained by the hammering on the mould-board of a plough, or from some equally crude musical instrument. If a wedding took place with the contracting parties having too many former dead spouses, or too great a difference in their ages, or when "too old people, who ought to be thinking of their graves enter for the second or third time into the holy state of wedlock" this was the motive for a charivari. On the wedding night all the young men in the community or neighbourhood assembled to "charivari" the bride and groom.

"For this purpose they disguise themselves, blackening their faces, putting their clothes on hind part before, wearing terrible masks, with grotesque caps on their heads adorned with cocks' feathers and bells. They then form a regular body, and proceed to the bride groom' s house, to the sound of tin kettles, horns, and drums, cracked fiddles, and all the discordant instruments they can collect together."

Another website http://www.serve.com/shea/germusa/marriage.htm describes the German custom as follows:

Ever heard of the POLTERABEND? It's the eve-of-the-wedding party and, yes, it has to do with "poltern" = making a racket, rattle-rattle, noise. Other

(regional) versions are "Holabend," "Rumpelnacht" and "Schaiwomt" (Scherbenabend), in some German-American communities "charivari" or "ch[sh]ivaree," was named after the French tradition (possibly via Alsation immigrants) of making a noisy mock serenade with rattles to newly weds. When, way back, mummers produced this noisy "Katzenmusik" at a wedding, it had the symbolic meaning of protecting against all kinds of harm and calamity. Polterabend is first mentioned in 1517 (central Germany).

Friends bring old dishes and smash them for the same purpose as with the "Katzenmusik" of the charivari. In some regions, the bride must sweep up the damage, in most others now the bridegroom does it. Some parties also observe shooting noises, as in the custom of shooting in the New Year. In the motorized age, tin cans may be dragged by the wedding car for some modern update.

Today, the Polterabend brings all the friends together again. This is economical, for financial or other restraints may call for a "small" wedding.

There's much more information on the web. Just fire up your favorite search engine and search on "charivari wedding" and read all about it.

Additional sites on this topic include:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/7705/Charivari.htm

http://www.charivaricajunband.com/

http://www.cajunculture.com/Other/wedding.htm

http://www.eoni.com/~ljh/Marriage.htm

http://www.geocities.com/old_time_time/charivari.htm

http://www.americanfamilytraditions.com/weddings.htm

http://www.theweddingassociation.com/shows.htm

I found this web page extremely helpful to me in translating German words and symbols used in old documents. I hope this will prove helpful to you.--Bob Roth http://www.genealogienetz.de/misc/gensig.html but there is yet a second site that looks like it’s a keeper in your bookmarks it is: http://dictionary.reference.com/translate/text.html

Here's a really excellent 1848 map of Posen that also extends west into Brandenburg and east as far as Lodz. Its also pretty enough to hang on the wall.

http://www.michaelectric.com/prussia/maps/posen_1848.jpg

Someone on the listserv made this comment that bears repeating “I learned this tidbit in a genealogy class and it really does make sense. Dates should be listed as:

Day month year with the month written out, example 2 Jun 2003. This clears up any confusion as to whether 2/6/03 means Feb. 6, 2003 or June 2, 2003. Europeans use the day-month-year format.

For anyone with ancestors who settled in the western prairies of Canada at the turn of the 20th century, you may wish to know that ArchiviaNet at http://www.archives.ca/02/0201_e.html has just added digital images of the Census of the Northwest Provinces, 1906 (Manitoba, Saskatchewan & Alberta) to their site. However, as these images are not indexed, you will need to know which districts they lived in. Census map images and district descriptions are included to help you out.

Every now and then I mention a web page that I've put together to list books etc. that have been compiled by researchers in the Germans from Russia community. The idea is to help compilers and authors connect with people who are researching those areas. http://www.genealogyunlimited.com/market.html

Some food for thought: You know you are living in the year 2003 when:

Your reason for not staying in touch with family is because they do not have e-mail.

You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.

You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.

Every commercial on television has a web site address at the bottom of the screen.

You buy a computer and 3 months later it's out of date and sells for half the price you paid.

Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go get it

Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.

You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.

You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.

Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.

Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.

You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.

You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.

You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

You wake up at 2 AM to go to the bathroom and check your E-mail on your way back to bed.

You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)

You're reading this and nodding and laughing. Even worse; you know exactly who you are going to forward this to!

.....author unknown