Family Tree in Cross Stitch . . .

My older daughter was married in July, 2016.  I wanted to make her and her husband something special for Christmas. I knew she was very interested in researching her family tree, as well as her new family's genealogy.  I've written a couple of blogs about each of our experiences.  This blog will be a continuation of sorts.

I like to make unique things. When I thought about it making a family tree I got excited because I knew my daughter and son in-law would appreciate it and it could even become a family heirloom. I started looking for cross stitch patterns, but much to my dismay, most family trees begin with one person and record their maternal and paternal sides. I wanted a tree that would be a record of both sides of their families and have room for their children.  I came upon a picture online of a large tree with the silhouette of couple under it.

I thought about how I might be able to turn this into what I wanted to make. First I would need to make it larger and turn it into a graph pattern.  Thank goodness for online sites that will take any picture and turn it into a graph for cross stitch or crochet. Here's what I got:

The next thing I wanted to do is take my daughter's favorite engagement picture and try to substitute it for the couple in the picture. I edited the picture down to the couple, changed the color to black and white, changed the size to match the size of the couple in the picture and use that as my new silhouette. I outlined both my daughter and her husband so I could use two different colors, a light and dark gray, to distinguish between the two bodies. Here is the graph and the cross stitch equivalent.

With the silhouette of the couple in place, I went ahead and finished the tree and all it's branches.  It was easy enough to place the couple's names and wedding date in the center of the heart made by the branches.  It was a little more difficult trying to add the names of their parents and grandparents and not disturb the flow of the branches. Using a light and dark green floss for the names, I counted and slightly eliminated a few stitches to allow the names to fit in.  The dark green floss was used to highlight the "family" surname on both sides. Once it was done and framed I couldn't wait to give it to them for Christmas.  I can add a title to it "Our Family Tree," and children's names if they want down the road.

Family Tree: Tracking Them Down

My mother, Jennie

My daughter has picked up where we left off digging up information, documents and pictures tracing our family tree. She even started a blog called, "Tracking Them Down," where she writes about some of her experiences. She has tried her hand at colorizing pictures too, starting with one of my mother that we all love (see above). It's a great hobby that she enjoys when she has the time to devote to it.

While she is working on documenting all her information on charts, she is also scanning every picture she can get and scanning them into the computer. She is noting names and dates and whatever else she feels is important. Eventually she plans to put them on on flashdrives and give them to her cousins. Then everyone will have a complete set preserved for their families.

This April marked the anniversary of my Uncle Tony's death. We were going to his daughter, Maria's, house for Easter dinner. We came up with the idea of making a collage of her father's old pictures to surprise her. My daughter had a few pictures in mind and she printed them. The collage came out pretty nice and Maria was very touched and appreciative to have gotten it. She looked at it for a long time and almost couldn't put it down.

Her father's Confirmation, Graduation, Graduation with his mother, Army

 



This weekend we were invited to Maria's for a Memorial Day barbeque. Seeing as how Mother's Day fell in May, I thought it would be nice to make another collage to go with the first one. This time I asked my daughter if she could find pictures of my grandmother, two aunts and my mother, the women who we all grew up with as children and the women my uncle Tony was closest to in his family. And here is what she came up with:

 

Our Grandmother, Sisters Mary, Vincenza, and Jennie (my mom)

 

 

When I handed her the package she knew immediately it was more pictures, but she wouldn't unwrap it right away. She spent a few minutes guessing which pictures we possible selcted. She wasn't sure if they were more recent pictures of us as children, or more old pictures of aunts and uncles. She was pretty close! She was once again surprised to see all her aunts and her favorite picture of grandma, who died a couple before she was born and after who she was named. I'm glad we came up with this idea because Mother's Day was in May and it was so appropriate to put all the "moms" together. Of course her own mom, my Aunt Mary, isn't in this frame, but one day the two collages will be tied together with the most important woman in my Uncle Tony's life and the next big event in his life" their wedding picture. The only thing that remains is to find an original picture to copy. You can see, in my uncles collage above, a small copy of that picture that will one day complete this set.

 

I'm very happy my daughter has a love for her family history and that we took the time, before she was born, to find out all we could. One day soon, my daughter and I are planning to make a large family tree wreath. I have been thinking of the best way to go about it and I need to get craft supplies.

 

I would encourage everyone who is interested in doing the same type of thing to start as soon as you can. Memories fade over time, the elders in the family pass away, and it gets harder to get the rich details that you don't want to lose for generations that follow.

 



Family Tree . . . The Next Generation

I wrote a blog back in 2011 about how my brother and I were inspired by the 1977 mini series Roots, by Alex Haley, to do research on our own famiy tree. It was a great hobby and we learned a lot. After working on it for a good couple of years or more, we reached a dead end. When I married my husband in 1983, we picked it up again. My husband wanted to try and find out what he could about his family too. We wanted to do it to share all we could with our own children when they were old enough to appreciate it. If we hadn't taken the time to collect documents and oral history much of it would have been lost today because our parents and their generation are all but gone.

The past two years, my older daughter has picked up where we left off. She has been subscribed to ancestry onine, checking cenus records, old newspapers, and looking into any resource she can find for any new pieces of information. She has also become slightly obsessed with collecting all the very old family pictures and scanning them into a computer to later save on flashdrives for everyone in the family so they will never be lost. It's a monumental project to say the least and she devotes much of her free time to gathering and preserving information. This past Christmas she asked for gifts all related to this new passion of hers: books, folders, file boxes etc. She enjoys the detective work and discovering things we didn't years ago. She found a picture of her great grandfather's model ships that were on display back in 1940's on Long Island. We knew his hobby was making ships out of tuna cans because my mother in-law had told us that when she asked her a million questions. Her father worked for a tuna company and I guess he had access to the cans they were packaged in.

My mother in-law also told us she was engaged to another man, before she married my father in-law, who had been killed in the war in 1944. My daughter researched his military records. She cross references information she finds in the census records with the little information we have, to dig for more information. One day she was looking through some things my mother in-law had saved and she came across something very odd. It was a picture of my mother in-law, was wearing a wedding dress, posing with, who we suspect, is her "fiancee." She was shocked and I was speechess. All I could tell her was that no one I ever knew of posed with a fiancee in their wedding dress for pictures . . . maybe they were married and she never said anything about that to us? It definitely peaked our curiosity. My daughter noted that she was wearing the same wedding dress as the one she married my father inlaw in, but the veil was different. We still don't know what to make of it. My daughter has been trying to find out if there is any record or proof of a marriage. This may remain forever an unanswered question and mystery. We also had a picture of my husband's uncle, who was a well known priest. He had an usual name and my daughter was abe to learn some things about him. One day, a church contacted her. They had seen the blog she was writing about her journey "Tracking Them Down" and her post about this priest. They asked her for his picture, they needed it for something they were preparing to honor him. Of course she told them they could use it.

You just never know what you are going to turn up when you start digging. You can interview your relatives until you are blue in the face, somethings will never come out. I remember we questioned our inlaws about both sides of the family. They had stories to tell, names, dates, a few old pictures. My husband sent away for death certificates, birth certicates and even baptismal certificates, like my brother did. We got the death certificate on my husband's grandmother. It turns out that my father in-law's mother died of asphixiation. She committed suicide by leaving the gas stove on. No one ever mentioned it, even decades later. She had been depressed. We would have never known had it not been for that document.

I'm glad my older daughter has picked up the torch and is carrying on the research. For one thing, all of our work from almost 40 years ago wasn't in vane. She appreciates what we were trying to do. For another, I know she will do a great job organizing and preserving our family history for the present and future generations of our family. She is trying her hand at colorizing some pictures and removing the age worn creases and cracks in an attempt to restore others. It will take her years to accomplish all she would like to do. I just hope her future children will take the same interest and appreciation in all of it that she has.

*****

My daughter is journaling her experiences in her own blog, "Tracking Them Down" which can be found at http://trackingthemdown.wordpress.com/