The Kaski & Untiedt Family Trees

I consider myself to be a family history archivist, not a digital content creator. As an archivist, I've been pretty hesitant to edit historical pictures beyond the basics: cropping, rotating, or an occassional straightening. This is despite owning Lightroom and using it for own personal photography projects. I try hard to find the original picture if available. When I can't, I try and start with the best copy that I can locate. Then, I very carefully scan with the highest settings and save initially as high-quality TIFFs comparing carefully the digitial and print versions. I tell myself "if this photo was destroyed tomorrow, did I get the best reproduction possible?" Properly archived, I can then start sharing the best possible jpeg version, keeping the character as is (sun-damaged, wrinkled, torn, or finger-printed).  But, I had an important photo of my great-grandparent Mann's wedding. The best print had some oily fingerprints. After the initially scans showed ...

I am always fascinated when I see that two people in my family tree end up in essentially the same place at the same time when there is no logical shared connection to that location. I'm not talking about someone from South Dakota bumping in to someone from Iowa; things a little more off the beaten path. It is as though there is more that might draw us to a place than what we instinctively process. Like the way the North American monarch butterfly can find its way to its ancesteral nesting ground.  What innate abilities might we possess that draw us towards each other, or to the same places? I've come across many such instances in my research. I'll use this single post to start documenting them. So if this also interests you, bookmark this link and come back in a few months, and see what other cousins you could have walked right by and never knew. Same Place, Case #1, Stroh descendants (Part I) Added: June 16, 2025 Jurgen Stroh was born in Germany in the early 1800s. In 185...

I've gone off the deep end on a side project. My eldest daughter, Carmen, has a close work friend who was adopted during infancy. Work friend, let's call her "L", recently took an Ancestry DNA test and asked for my assistance to see if I could help her find her birth sister. I said "I'll give it a try" and have now built her a family tree of 1,897 persons, biologically connected to her, but none can be confirmed as her birth parents or birth sibling. Yikes! It's been quite an adventure and stalled all my work, research and scanning related to my own family tree lines. First, she has no close DNA matches. Her closest match is listed as "LastName" and has no tree, no information, and no other close matches. One of her parent's appears to have come from a family of 9 siblings, none who have DNA tested and all who have been pretty good at locking down their data. I've loaded L's DNA to other genealogy sites (with her permission, of ...