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I have updated the basic design. I intend to add some random content here and there for the next few months. There is such a huge amount of things to scan, that occasionally I will add a subset of what I have scanned.
Ultimately, I want to add a documents section that will be password protected - but accessible to family members. Also, I want the website eventually to have sections broken down by family( for example, the Maurice and Alice Murphy, and the Eddie and Julia Ruef families ), so that many will have their own web pages with their family's content.
Much of what I have will be under Maurice and Alice Murphy, but I do have wedding photos, etc..., and eventually if you all send in content, I can add it, or someone that takes over from me can add it.
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August 4, 2008
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I started scanning today, and will add some new pictures and documents tomorrow. Most of the photos and other documents are all in Portable Document Format (PDF) type files. If you cannot read these file types, let me know and I will help you be able to read them.
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August 9, 2008
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Well before there was email, there was vmail in WWII. Some of the vmail was recorded on microfiche and sent on 16mm film. I will post some examples. I have posted some examples. Note that in these letters are abbreviations, like we use today in instant messaging. For instance, G.I.L.Y. stands for Gee I love You. There are other ones in some of the letters, and I am hesitant to attempt a translation lest we all blush!
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August 11, 2008
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I have sorted out all the files by: Letters back and forth from my parents, letters to my dad from others, letters to my dad from 1925 to 1931, and miscellaneous stuff. The letters from my parents to each other from March 1943 to October 1943 are how shall I say - slightly risque at times, with much innuendo at the end of each letter. Very surprising for two such solid citizens! I will post a limited amount of these - the rest on DVDs for storage!
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August 19, 2008
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I have sorted through about 8 bins of stuff, and am pretty much ready to start scanning the large volume of 1900-1945 material. Also, there are some changes. The photos I thought were Grandpa and Grandma Seibel, are in fact, Henry and Ellen Foley. The mistake made because the back of the picture said "Ma and Pa"-who knew!
Anyway, corrections are being made.
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August 21, 2008
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I have started making links to other pages through the pictures. Eventually, many, if not all of the pictures under the category (family tree), will have links up and down the line of our tree.
There will be an absence of new pictures from August 26th through September 12. I will be reworking the format though.
I have found some interesting links in the family via other people genealogy work. I had heard that the family had changed the name foley from something else, and there was a cousin that came through town with a genealogy - about forty years ago ( from Idaho I think). Anyway, Foley used to be Poulin ( in Canada ). Henry Foley, was born in 1857. His father, John Foley, was originally called Nazaire Poulin. His wife, if you can believe the "witchy" name, was Margaret Hamilton.
Henry, married Ellen Corrigan, and their children were people we were familiar with ( Mary, Clara, Alice, Katherine, Austin, and Marguerite). There was another child I think - Harry, that was born around 1887, and never shows up again in any of the censuses. Katherine did name her son Harry ( Harry Lucas ). So our Irish Pedigree has increased to about 5/8ths Irish, as Ellen Corrigan's parents were both from Ireland. And Margaret Hamilton's parents were from Ireland as well, but they also have a french connection somewhere.
More later.
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August 22, 2008
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More interesting and provocative and life changing is some info I found out today. The Foley who we thought was french had a more interesting beginning. According to what I found today, John Foley, started out life as a Foley, and became orphaned in Nova Scotia. He was born in 1800. In order to get married to Charlotte Gauthier in 1819, he was adopted by Joseph Poulin. John Foley, his son, was born Nazair Poulin, buth then changed his name to John Foley and emigrated to the US. His son, Henry and wife Ellen Corrigan, then had our Grandmother Alice, and the other Foley women. So our mothers were 3/4 Irish!
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October 2, 2008
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Back from Ireland on September 11, 2008. We had a great time visiting family, and going to Maureen's cousin's wedding in Tipperary. Then, after seeing more of her relatives, we went up north into Mayo. We stopped at Manor Hamilton, where supposedly Margaret Hamilton, our great great grandmother on the Foley side, was from ( I will check on the layering of greats). This is the picture of the day.
I have started scanning again today, and expect to have more online tomorrow. I am working on a format to put both scrapbooks up and online. Either way, I will post some bits and pieces tomorrow.
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October 4, 2008
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I have the first scrapbook up on the website. Its about as big as I can make it. I apologize for it only being 10 seconds in between pictures, and for the lame music!
The Second Scrapbook will be ready tomorrow. The picture quality on these is bad on some images. I will probably need to edit some of these specially in Photoshop to fix the faded ones.
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October 6, 2008
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I realize that the pictures in the scrapbook are related to the letter I have from the 1920's to the mid 1930's. I will have to go back and read them and find out who some of the people are.
I realize now, after looking at scrapbooks and pictures, that this is a whole distant part of our parents lives that we knew little of. By the time I remember my parents ( they were about fifty), they had gone through the depression and war, and red scare - not great times. We mostly knew them after this. But the pictures and letters speak to similarities with all of us. And especially the letters from WWII speak to our current war - i.e. wanting it to get over quickly. All in all, this is very interesting. I will not be able to put more than a fraction on this site. But I look forward to your pictures and letters as well - their addition will make this quite the place to look at such a great family as ours!
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November 6, 2008
Well the news on the election is quite interesting. I've always been pretty liberal ( Jerry Brown ), as most of you know, so I am happy with the outcome. We are down in New Orleans right now, settling back in here and doing some work. I hope to get back to archiving here with some stuff I brought down on a DVD. I will be incorporating the pictures into the family tree, so if you have pictures of your family you want to represent you with, please let me know. Otherwise I will just post what I have for now, or add an empty box. My idea though is to get this feature finished for my first cousins, and then I will add in their kids as a next step. Thanks again to all of you that have emailed me.
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December 9, 2008
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I have gotten as definitive as I can on the Seibel Line. Peter Seibel, our Great-Grandfather, was born in Germany in 1845 (or so). Philippine Arnoldi was born in Germany in September, 1851. They had five children ( Karl, Pauline, Theodore, Herbert, and Hazel). Both Karl, who also went by Arnoldi, and Pauline, were born in Germany. The lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Peter Seibel died in the 1890s, and I am awaiting a death certificate for him (possibly). I will be adding them to the family tree.
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January 8, 2009
Happy New Year! Maureen and I went to Holy Cross Cemetery today. We were able to take a picture of my parent's grave, and Grandpa/Grandma Murphy's grave, but could not find the Seibel/Uncle Johnny and Aunt Helen Grave. We will try another day. I have the death certificate for Peter Seibel from 1894 in Ashland Wisconsin. His death is listed as suicide. I have the details as given by my mom. I will be scanning in Sister Clarine's and Sr. Elise's letters over the next several days. One of Sister Clarine's is interesting when they (the order) tried to keep her from coming home. You can guess her response! I knew I liked her (loved her).
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May 30, 2009
We are back from New Orleans, and a long hiatus from working on the Website. It, and the economy, etc..., have proven to sap my energy, but needless to say, both are what they are! I'm really just kidding. I have been a bit lazy, and have been enjoying being lazy. But now I am feeling like getting back into it. There is just so much though that I tend to use my ADHD skills to not focus on anything for very long!
Do not expect too many more changes to the layout. I will be adding more odds and ends hopefully, and more pictures. I have all the letters I am ever going to get, but just need to scan them and put them on-line. The pictures are the real problem. Since finding a good scanner and negatives, I realize the quality is going to come from the negatives and this presents much more work, but in the end a much better layout and more realistic look at the lives of our family over nearly a century of pictures.
More to follow!
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July 11, 2009
I'm moving things around the next few days and adding more structure to the archives.
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July 26, 2009
This site is now also accessible from www.sfarchives.com. My goal is to make this a history site for our family. When I am long gone, I hope our family history will be around for others to read, so that the history of their era is not told only through the lives of the rich and famous, but of good, regular folks who happened to be our relatives!
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November 14, 2009
I am revising the web pages to take advantage of the many negatives I have been scanning in ( 1000 as of today ), which are of pretty good quality. I will be matching them up with the scrapbooks and do the best job I can sorting out dates and people. If any of you have dates or names, please feel free to email me and fill me in. And if you do fill me in, let me know what the source was - such as personal recollection, a photo with a description, etc.... As you know, this is a work in progress, so you can expect it to look a bit rough over the next two months. Thereafter I will just add to things.
Immediately ( in the next two weeks ), I will be updating how the document pages look, and also adding in photographic series. Don't expect anything until after Thanksgiving, but it could be earlier.
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December 13, 2009
I've updated the format for the vacation page, and how the documents are presented. I think I will keep it this way for the foreseeable future.
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February 19, 2010
I am starting on finishing my current series of scannings, so I hope to start assembling what I have. Its real difficult though to stop scanning as I find more and more stuff that is interesting, like the pictures of McLaren Park, and Aunt Cecilia, my mom and Henry Lauberge's Horses. I realize just what a big part of their lives was involving horse back riding.
I've also gotten in touch with the Columban Fathers, and the St. Joseph of Carondolet Order, and they will get some copies of the pictures of Sr. Clarine - these include where she was stationed in Arizona, as well as St. Mary's Academy/Marymount in Los Angeles.
And on top of the problem with the over zealous scanning, I have also been distracted by how to show sets of pictures. So for now, I am going to put them in as "events", or "series". I realize that when they took pictures back then, as now, they took a bunch with different cameras at the same time. So I find myself scanning different formats of sometimes dubious resolution. So initially, I will have some lower quality of some people, and will replace them as I can with better quality. And for now also, I will have way more of Bill Murphy than anyone else except for Tom Murphy. So I will probably just do a representative amount, but also, some of the Bill Murphy pictures also show an unfinished 32nd Avenue, so its kind of interesting to show those as well.
Its a work in progress ....
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June 23rd, 2010
Its been a long time since I posted any news. Laziness is part of the reason, and the reality is that I've been holding back on posting a bit because I'm still perplexed on how everything should be viewed.
And now (as of yesterday), I have realized that I can scan those damned Kodak 110 films that are so tiny, that I thought I could get away with leaving that for someone else down the road to scan. Well it turns out that my scanner will in fact do a decent job by scanning at the highest resolution. So eventually, I will have a nice showing of mom and dad's photos that they took up until their earthly demise. As many of you know, I have the FACEBOOK Group, "Seibelmurphy". Its one way I can put out some of the work in progress.
December 1, 2018
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Note: I have updated much of the site and announced today that there will be more access to the Facebook Closed Group "SeibelMurphy" on a case by case basis. Use the Form to send me a request, or look me up on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/seibelmurphy)
Bye for now.
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