A couple of weeks ago, I did get something that both my daughter and I found to be very cool!  I new Halloween craft book full of a variety of projects – Witch Craft: Wicked Accessories, Creepy-Cute Toys, Magical Treats, and More!

Witch Craft: Wicked Accessories, Creepy-Cute Toys, Magical Treats, and More!

This book comes complete with craft projects that younger and older kids can do, treats that the family can make together, as well as some great crochet and knitting projects (yippee for me)!

Upon first browsing, I immediately fell in love with these really cute crochet bones featured in the book and got started on those first.  Then my daughter and I made a night of fashioning the felt poison apples together (we’ve always liked making felt crafts anyway).  For our apple pictures, we each posed with our plushie apples, and she directed: “Hold it like the twilight.”

As Halloween approaches, we’ll definitely be trying out the treats and other adorable projects, and I’d say that with the vast variety of unique crafts this book has to offer, it’s definitely worth Amazon’s current $10.17 sticker price!

The best thing is knowing that Natasha treasures the things I make for her and the things we make together.  I went into her bedroom, where she has a special display shelf, and found that our new creations were on display.  Sweet!

And making amigurumi (crocheted or knitted animals, dolls, and creatures) just got a whole lot easier with the onslaught of pattern books that have recently hit the market!

So many awesome amigurumi books, so little time and money…

So here are the ones I have already:

Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More!

Amigurumi World: Seriously Cute Crochet

Easy Crochet Critters

Amigurumi Two!: Crocheted Toys for Me and You and Baby Too

The doll my daughter has so sweetly tucked in was a vampiress from Creepy Cute Crochet. She also thought that this crocheted pie made for a cute home:

Vampiress in a Pie

I recently made a little Leo (just like me!) from Easy Crochet Critters for her.  Needless to say, it was a hit.

Little Leo

Now clearly I have enough patterns to keep me busy for years to come, but that doesn’t stop me from really really wanting these:

Crobots: 20 Amigurumi Robots to Make

CROBOTS?!?  How cool is that?!  Plus the thought of getting creative and adding various beads and doodads sends me reeling!

And finally, this delicious gem:

Tasty Crochet: A Pantry Full of Patterns for 33 Tasty Treats

Crochet apples, bacon, mushrooms, and MORE?!  Oh my!!

My daughter is requesting a cupcake to cuddle with, and as usual, her idea is a great one – I’m enamored with the thought of making rows of colorful cute cupcakes!  So Michael’s, here we come!

I also plan on posting research methods that have worked well for me, so maybe someone out there will find either that or the data useful.  You can check it out here.

I will, however, keep updating this site with new genealogy pages I do and genealogical trips I go on.

I was able to get her siblings’ previously unknown names and birthdates from the History of Jerusalem Lutheran and Reformed Church of Western Salisbury.  I must say, I have now found more than one genealogical treasure from Google Books and will definitely be using it often in my research!

I have found other Breys that were living in Northampton County (now Lehigh) and really want to do a site on the history of German immigrants in Pennsylvania… or maybe een a site where I can post ancestral data I find that may or may not be related to my family, but that I still want to have a record of… but if I’m going to do that it will have to be separate from this and from my genealogy wiki because it really doesn’t fit in either.

What’s so tricky about these two is that there are so many variations on the spellings of their last names.  Elizabeth’s has been spelled Bry, Brey, Bray, and even Brier and Jacob’s has been spelled Beal, Beals, Beels, and Biehl.

So far I have her page up on my Beals/Hall genealogy wiki and have posted the info that I already had, now I’m going to see if I can find more… to start with, I’m doing a small page on Elizabeth’s birthplace (and the home of many of my ancestors),  Lehigh County, PA to get a better picture of the history and land and to serve as a placeholder for my favorite Lehigh links to refer to later.

It definitely has some aesthetic appeal that my wiki doesn’t have with eight attractive templates to choose from, and I must say their rounded rectangles make for a much smoother tree than my dashes and plus signs.  But I’m afraid that’s where that benefits over the wiki end.  I had thought that since this was a database driven application (using PHP and MySQL) that it would make connections easily.  I thought I could enter a person, enter their parents, and then they would show up in the tree that way.  But so far, and I may be missing something here, it has not been so easy.  I entered a child, the child’s parents, and one of the parent’s parents and then went to the tree section of the site hoping they would appear there (at least in some form – maybe a message saying”‘hey, look at me, do I belong in the tree?’”), but they didn’t.  And furthermore, when I went to enter them, it asked me to enter their relationships once again.  To add insult to injury, I often got an endlessly spinning circle or a frozen screen when trying to add members.  So in essence, I was hoping for something that has the ease of Ancestry.com, but got a very janky app. instead.

Another thing that bothered me was the security, or rather the lack of; I went to the site from a new computer and it was already logged in to the admin area :S

In all fairness, they do have a large support forum, testimonials that boast of fantastic customer service, and FAQ’s to help you along the way, but why can’t it be more intuitive from the start?

Also, there are a few things I don’t like about the templates that I would really need to customize.  For instance, I really like how my wiki site has everything you’d want to know about a person on that person’s page, including their bio, tree segment, and photo gallery.  To have this in TNG I would have to do some heavy customizations to the template(s).

So I will work with it some more to see if it’s what I really want, but it’s not the genealogy platform that I’ve been dreaming of.

I did manage to get a nice amount of information from Mouser Ancestry, and you can even read a wonderful biography on their site.  And I managed to get a few census records and a bit about he and his wife from a book on Ancestry.com… but that’s not enough – I want parents’ info!

So far I’ve scoured Google books and Google newspaper archives but have found next to nothing… so if YOU have any ideas, please leave a comment here!

What we do know is that Jacob Beals was married to Elizabeth Bry (or Brye, Brey, or Bray) and was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania on April 15, 1806 and died October 20, 1890 and that he was “of German descent.”

James Francis Beals

I’m still working mainly on my dad’s side of the family and have spent the past couple of days putting James Francis Beals‘s page together and it would truly be ‘but a mere shadow of its former self’ (a phrase my dad used to use often) if it weren’t for the vast amount of information on James F. Beals that Mouser Ancestry has gathered and allowed me to use in my tree.

So while my husband’s ancestors were medicine men and Cherokee outlaws, mine were vanilla German farmers in Pennsylvania - well, vanilla as far as I know, there still could be stories out there to uncover and mysteries to reveal.

Cherokee Heritage Center

Ned Christie - my husband's direct ancestor!

This weekend my husband, daughter, and I went to Tahlequah to do some research on my husband’s Cherokee side of the family at the Cherokee Heritage Center and Tsa La Gi village.  It was a splendid trip all around!  ‘Twas a beautiful Spring day, and all of Tahlequah was in bloom.  If you’ve never been there, it’s one of the most beautiful, magical places in the world with so much intrigue.  It triples as a college town, a Native American cultural area, as well as an Okie small town so it has all of these worlds colliding, but what’s really special about it is that it’s nestled in the heart of a hilly forest, not to mention it’s also the most relaxed place.

Not only was it a lovely road trip, but I got a wealth of information!  No really, a treasure trove of information!  We went Saturday morning and they had a genealogy helper there, the nicest guy, who was able to pull up my husband’s family history seven generations back.  It had their Native American names and even stories about many of them.  I found out that Ned Christie (the only man the the U.S. military ever went after with a cannon!) is in my husband’s direct line and that some of his other direct ancestors died on the Trail of Tears, where many Native Americans were forced to move out of their lands and into Oklahoma and many died along the way. 

We went from the museum which displayed both the artwork and pride of the Cherokees along with the sad history, to a tour of the ancient Tsa La Gi village.   So it was a nice family trip as well as being a productive research trip; we all enjoyed visiting the museum and taking a tour of the village. 

My husband’s relatives had remembered little about their family history so I was afraid that his side would remain very much a mystery, but now a whole new world of information has opened up – enough to keep me very busy for a long time on my genealogy wiki.  And what a rich, colorful history his family has!  Along with Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie and Trail of Tears survivors, there was a medicine man and a murderer in the family.

Here are some photos from our family/genealogical trip to Tahlequah:

Cherokee National Museum and Genealogical Research Center

Trail of Tears Plaque

Trail of Tears Plaque

Tsa La Gi Village

Tsa La Gi - an ancient Cherokee village

Cherokee dolls and pottery at a typical Cherokee home

Our guide showed us how the young Cherokee boys would hunt with blowguns

The Cherokees made bows and arrows like this one and chipped stones to craft arrowheads

Flint stones for weapons

The interior of a typical tribal meeting house where community decisions were made. It was a warm day but inside it was as cool as can be - the Cherokees had a ventilation system where hot air escaped from the top of the building and cool air came in through the bottom.

We learned a lot about our family, enjoyed the perfecto weather, and finished off our day with a late lunch of burgers at a local favorite restaurant in Tahlequah – Del Rancho.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember meeting them, but I am glad someone had the forethought to save all of these  obituaries.  Too bad I don’t have any pictures for them…