Cameron County Genealogy Club Discover Your Past
Meeting Notes 8/2/2003
| A special thanks to Kim Irwin for taking the notes and
recreating the meetings for us! Cameron County Genealogy Club Meeting Minutes & Notes - August 2, 2003 The August 2 meeting session began at about 1:06 PM at the Library, with eight members in attendance. Mike Wennin wanted to thank Chuck and Inez Jordan for the invitation to the Allegheny Mountain Engine & Implement Association's 24th Annual Demonstration held July 25-27. Other club members enjoyed the demonstration also. Mike brought copies of the maps of the 1870 Vosberg Map, Beers survey maps and others, which had previously been displayed at the April 5th meeting. In business matters, the previous meeting of July 12 netted $14.05, which brings the total to $119.55 presently in the club savings account. The discovery of the books "Royally Rugged Cameron County" by Ira Collins (copyright 1976) brought happiness to many genealogists in being able to purchase this book ($10) and read about the local folklore, old time pictures, descriptive narratives, maps, and county statistics. It is also being offered on the Internet and orders are flowing in. This copy is the second (ca.1980) printing with an addendum in the center pages. The stash of books was found in a back room, just like the collection of yearbooks from 1923. The 1923 yearbook had interesting personal write-ups on all of the students, plus alumni from 1889 to 1922, who they married, where they were living in 1923, and what they were doing with their lives. Sandy Lyon's grandmother graduated in the class of 1906, which had all girls, and she was searching for her grandmother's brother, who did not graduate. In addition to the 1923 yearbooks, the Museum has the 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, and 1911 yearbooks. These yearbooks are tall, thin and paperback. The 1923 yearbook is named "The Specter" with photos in those also. Mike would like to get scans made of those eventually. Mike questioned if anyone was researching the Charles Villella or Elihu Chadwick name. The Little Museum has found typewritten research papers on the Chadwick family going back to the 1600's in Europe. Sandra Hornung is available at the Little Museum on Wednesday's and would probably let you snoop in the back room and search through the boxes of research papers. There is lots of stuff to go through yet. One member was going through the history of the Coal Company (Iron) of South Park in the deeds of the 1860's. There is also a listing of the Class of 1942 with the married names on the class pictures at the Little Museum. Although some of the classes are missing names, these could possibly be posted on the website. Steve Miller photographed the huge Beers 1872-73 map at the Little Museum entranceway, and this needs reduced in order to fit on the Internet for viewing. In addition, in the Museum treasure trove is a photograph of the people at the 1904 Ag Fair in Keystone Park of people who lived in Cameron County for over 50 years at that time. This photo was of about 20 or so people who settled in Cameron County in the 1850's, such as Wash Mason. Mike says they haven't even scratched the surface of old goodies and stuff in the Little Museum storage areas, and it needs cleaned out to get to the good stuff. There's 1990's handouts, junk and a gazillion unidentified photos. Maybe someone could make a collage out of them, or post them in storefront windows for the public to view and just maybe someone will recognize the people or places in the photos. The Library has a glass display case that could be used to view the old photos. Mike visited with John Kautz, the new president of the Cameron County Historical Society, for about a couple hours a short time ago, going over the spots that the Genealogy Club had questions about. John is all for a merger, with meeting money collected going towards the Genealogy Club and membership fees going to the Historical Society. John encouraged Mike to keep doing the good work that he has been doing with the Genealogy Club, and if a merger happens, the Club will become an offshoot of the Historical Society, with new memberships going towards the Historical Society. Mike has a two-page list of things to do and work on for promoting the Historical Society. The Little Museum 's registry of visitors is mostly out of town people, very few of the visitors are local. The Historical Society has to do a better job at promoting the museum. John Kautz will talk to PENN DOT to see if they can get a road sign to advertise the Little Museum. A large OPEN sign or flag would be helpful to draw in people who are driving through and viewing the scenery. The local newspapers could be used to do a better job at advertising the local events and available services. Maybe we need a taskforce to meet and brainstorm plans to promote local activities and attractions to our own residents. A possible regional tourist promotion committee might work out, although the fundraising monies should go to the direct tourism promotion, not management overhead. On the lighter side, Marty Lewis feels like a lost sheep in her genealogy research and is more or less in the self-help stages. Chuck Jordan is doing okay a little at a time, and is happy to get any help sharing information. According to personal accounts, the Family Tree Maker software seems to be the best help in organizing the family research. Remember to always back up your files! Don Hefright had a helpful hint on searching for items on the Internet in that when you input (i.e.,Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc.) the search words, put them in quotation marks so that the search will be more specific to your query. Mike mentioned that Richard Sarick of the Library told him about a Pennsylvania Humanities Group that gives grant money of up to $16,000 per request for presentations such as walking tours of a town, world histories, and the like, where the community is invited to participate. This may be something to check into and see if it can be applied to Cameron County. The group also has professional speakers who travel the state for the presentations. They focus on the rural community, and one topic may be dating old photographs by type of photo, type of clothing, identifying location and backgrounds. The grant money pays for the speaker's expenses. The presentations require proper advertising and a minimum of 25 people in attendance. A topic suggested by Marty Lewis may be to cover scrapbooking. The Little Museum has many scrapbooks donated to them through the years, plus the files that many families have in their own storage areas. Michele Rodich, the Cameron County High School Art teacher, has a Scrapbook Club and this topic may have a good turnout. Another project may be something that the Historical Society has an interest in is the identification of historic homes in Cameron County. We have many historic homes and possibly identifying these with a plaque and a booklet style map to locate them would be a good plan to promote local and visitor interest. Possibly a driving tour could be assembled for this accompanied by a booklet describing the historic areas with related stories and anecdotal information. Chuck Jordan mentioned that Bedford County has a driving tour of their area of 33 covered bridges. Mike acknowledged that the attendance at the Genealogy Club meetings has dwindled lately, but that it should pick up in September when people start to get back into coming again once their summer projects are done (and it quits raining so much!) Also of note is the discovery of the Township voter's tax records of 1876 to 1888, each with the names of voters. This area can fill in the timeline between the censuses for finding family members and where they resided. In addition, handwritten teacher's records from 1905-1906 for "out of area" schools were found. The out of area schools were those such as Sterling Run, Mason Hill, and the like. The records are of the students and visitors along with the teacher's annual report. This information will eventually make it to the Internet site. Mike says that John Kautz is open to sharing information between the Historical Society and the Genealogy Club, as he finds "the more the merrier!" We can help each other by reaching out to people who are not online and or don't have computer skills. The older folks have family Bibles and keepsake items and are a wealth of historical information. There are about 20 boxes of scrapbooks at the Museum that need sorted out. The Potter County Historical Society has a method whereby the members donate a little bit of their time each week to help sort the material they receive. It is a group effort. Cameron County can set up such a system also in order to organize all of the donated material, if we are willing and able to do it. There are family obituaries, birth records, death records, etc. that need organized. Sandy Lyon reported that Suzy Roberto's Dad, "Lunch" Roberto, had kept a lot of stuff, like WWII, weddings, obituaries and things in a scrapbook, and his son wasn't interested in keeping the information and gave it all to Sandy. These are treasures to her. When Mr. Koppenheffer, a local historian, passed away, his children weren't interested in all of the material that he had collected and they disposed of his collections. When Walter "Soap" Klock passed away, a portion of his collection went to Glenn Gutgsell, who would occasionally put some of those old time pictures in the Echo, such as a photo of the old railroad Round House. A list of railroad stations listed by county might be found on the Internet. As a fundraiser, we might scan those popular old pictures and have them available for sale at the Little Museum. Also on the Internet are the Ellis Island records from the 1880's forward. On www.cindislist.com , Mike says there are a gazillion websites of all categories and many more things to search. The immigrant documents and ship's records were transcribed by hand and people had a hard time reading some of the material, so some names and places were totally wrong and misspelled or letters/numbers transposed or names printed phonetically. Researchers would have to view several variations and alternate spellings of the family names to uncover hidden information. Marty Lewis has a cousin who has stories of the Titanic history along with dates and times. Mike relates that some family stories are not quite accurate when the times, dates, and places don't match up to the related stories; so a person may discover the stories aren't exactly based on factual information. At the previous meeting, Andy Kaul of St. Marys discussed his hobby of collecting named bricks. Mike went to the old Cameron Penn Block Works site up Steam Mill /Hunts Run Road and picked up a few old bricks for the door prizes. In researching a little about the brick collection club, Mike found that there is a very high interest in this type of collecting. From 1898 to about 1920, a Mr. Calder ran the Penn Block Brick Works at Cameron, PA. There were 10-15 houses for the company workers. Mr. Calder had tried to get a post office opened for this little neighborhood. In anticipation of approval, he had bricks made with the Penn Block-Calder, PA logo on them before his application was denied a post office site. The bricks from Penn Block-Cameron, PA and the Calder, PA bricks are the same place. The streets of Emporium are paved with the Cameron bricks. When Calder went out of business, the First National Bank (the old public library building) acquired tons and oodles of bricks. Sylvania Corp. borrowed money and got lots of bricks for their parking lot in the deal. At the end of the runway at the Airport, tons of them were used as fill. Sandy Lyon's father got some to build a fireplace out of. Mike even has one he has kept throughout his relocations from one home to the next. Four bricks that Mike collected at the old Penn Block Works were given as door prizes, including a couple that were burned. Sandy Lyon, Kim Irwin, Marty Lewis, and Alex Davis won the bricks. (Kim weighed her prize brick and it went for 10 lb. 4 oz, although it was burned and chipped. Those men had a very rough life handling those heavy things!) At the conclusion of the meeting at 2:12 PM, the winners of the bricks picked their choice and headed out, happy with their selections. Kim's Calder, PA brick is now holding down the dog bed to keep the puppy from taking off with it. We hope to see more members and visitors at the next Genealogy Club meeting scheduled for September 6, 2003. More participation is needed to keep the club going forward and devising new ideas for promoting and researching our personal and local history. See you there! kai 8-12-03 |
This page was last updated on Friday, September 19, 2003.
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