Profile Accuracy Theme of the Week: Homemade

Question

This week's theme: Homemade.

To participate, simply:

1. Choose a profile that fits this week's theme.
2. Review and improve the accuracy of the profile.
3. Reply with an answer below to let us know which profile you chose.

Answer 1

For Homemade I want to work on my Great Uncle Harry Miller who carved model ships as a hobby.  http://wikitree.com/wiki/Miller-54538.  Harry's profile needs improvement and I want to adopt three of his children who have no profile managers.   Here's Harry's pirate ship made around 1895.  

Comments

Thank you Pat for your wonderful answer for Homemade. It is great that you are working on the profile of your Great Uncle Harry; he certainly had a variety of talents with models of ships, decorating and music.

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What a magnificent photo with the ship

The photo are very artistic

Thank you for sharing

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Thank you, Alexis.  You're so kind with your comments and encouragement.

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Thanks, Susan.  I wonder how long it took to create the ship from a block of wood. Maybe he was carving different pieces and glued them together.

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Pat it Might have take a while because the ship are beautiful made

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That's a beautiful model, so intricate, it's incredible that it survived all these years.

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Thank you, Gillian. You're right.  Luck and great care, I guess. I do recall it being fragile.

Answer 2

This week I chose Henry Vernice Snyder: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Snyder-14109. He was well known in Muleshoe, Texas for his handmade windmills.

Comments

Thank you Micah for your work on Henry’s profile. His handmade wooden windmills are wonderful.

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thank you Alexis.

Answer 3

This week I will work on the profile of my second great grandmother Adaline Hutton and the profiles of her parents and children. Her family and friends made this Pennsylvania signature quilt for her in 1845 when she married and moved to Illinois.https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hutton-1660

Comments

Alexis what a fantastic quilt it is so beautiful

Thank you for sharing

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Outstanding profile of Adaline Hutton, Alexis, very touching obituary, a strong woman in spirit.  These quilts from the 1800s are works of art.  I loved the collection they had in the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

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Pat, the museum in Vermont  sounds fascinating. Thank you for your comment.

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Alexis, I don't know if you looked up the Shelburne Museum (Joyce is always great a providing links. I don't know how to do it) but if you are ever in Vermont, just south of Burlington, it is treasure. Americana, 4 centuries of folk art and more, 39 buildings on 45 acres, a steamship, train, lighthouse, a covered bridge.  Everything was moved to the site.  It takes two days to see it all but we saw a lot in a day.  Beautiful place.

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That is an absolute treasure Alexis, and an interesting story.

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Thank you Gillian for your nice comment. I will add more to her biography.

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Pat, it took me some time to learn how to create a link or post a picture. When I finally learned how, I created some instructions for both. Here's the link.

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@Joyce, thank you for the link on how to create a link.  I put it on my favorites and will see if I can do it next challenge.

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@Pat, I'll be watching!

Answer 4

For this week's topic, I set out to raise the profile of my wife's maternal grandmother, Elsa Poggensee, nee Kruse (1902-1989). She was the oldest of 10 children of a small farmer, and as a young girl learned the trade of seamstress after school. This led to her always sewing all the clothing for her four children herself, especially dresses for the two girls.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kruse-1825

Comments

Dieter, I love that you chose Elsa and her being a seamstress. My mother was an excellent seamstress. When I had sewing in school we made an apron and a simple skirt. Then my mother sent me to school with a pattern for a dress with a complicated jacket.

Answer 5

For the topic "Homemade", I worked on the profile of May Wait (Davis-72848).

You have probably never had homemade gelatin, which is made by boiling bones, often calf's feet. This long and tedious process results in a jelly to which various ingredients can be added to create an elegant molded salad or a nourishing food for an invalid. (If you want to make it at home, here is a recipe,)

In 1895, Pearle Wait bought a formula for making "portable gelatin." He planned to become rich by making the gelatin, then selling it door-to-door to housewives who could add the other ingredients. His wife May suggested adding fruit syrups to this concoction, and named it (ta-da!) Jell-o. But Pearle did not have much luck selling Jell-o to his neighbors in Le Roy, New York. He sold the formula and the brand name Jell-o for $450 to Orator Francis Woodward.

Woodward's brilliant marketing strategies made Jell-o a household word. (To Emma Lazarus, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were "huddled masses," but to Woodward they were potential consumers, and welcomed with a dish of Jell-o.)

Is there a dish of homemade Jell-o in your refrigerator?

Comments

Fascinating, as usual, Joyce.  I guess if you really want to be rich don't sell your golden goose without shares in the company.  It's very sad what happened to May.  Jello was really popular when I was growing up.  I thought it  had declined but then I learned that in 2011, 420 million boxes were sold!

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I forgot to add the link. Jell-o was also used to create the Horse of a Different Color in The Wizard of Oz.

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Oh, Joyce, thank you for your links but Jello-O used to keep the Red Sea parted in the Ten Commandments, that's hilarious.

Answer 6

I have chosen to work on the profile of Antonia Blaustein who was born about 1863 in Hungary. She married a tailor from Russia in London then move to Bath. In three censuses the family has lodgers living with them, all but one employed in the theatre. I suspect she was very busy making a home for these people. I will improve her profile and possibly make profiles for her lodgers.

Comments

When I saw the topic "homemade" I only thought of homemade food, but other people thought of homemade ships, windmills, and quilts. You thought of "making a home," which is even more basic. I enjoy seeing how everyone interprets the weekly theme. Thank you.

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Lovely profile of Antonia, Gillian.  I've told you this before but it is worth repeating.  I love how you set up census records. When you don't have a picture it's really nice visually.

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Gillian, that is wonderful that you are also doing profiles on her lodgers. My paternal grandmother had a rooming house, so we had what we called roomers living with us. When I say something about roomers now days, people think I am talking about rumors. I did profiles on some of the roomers, but this was a special one that I was very close to. 

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Nieuwenhuis-257

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Thanks Joyce, it took me quite a while to think of that one!

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Thanks Pat, I have learned so much from doing 52 Weeks of Accuracy but census tables have felt like my biggest achievement.

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Thanks Alexis, that's a lovely profile for Theodora, I love the photos as background and her interesting story.

Answer 7

In the last part of the 19^th Century or the early 20^th, my Swedish great-grandfather, August Andersson (Andersson-9209), carved a wooden bowl for his wife.  It looks as though it was designed to knead dough for bread.   By the time of his death in 1949, August passed the work of his farm to his youngest son, Karl Gustaf Augustsson.  So Gustaf  retained the bowl.

 

In 1984, my father, Bergie Anderson, visited with Gustaf when he and my mother, Jean, made a trip to Sweden.  While they were there, Gustaf gave my father some small items of the family, including the wooden bowl.   I now have the bowl.  Since only a year ago I improved the biography of August Andersson, for this week, I will work the biography of his son, my father’s uncle, Karl Gustaf (Augustsson-118).

Comments

It's so wonderful when family members pass on artifacts from the family's history.  Thank you for sharing the photo and story, Wayne.

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I had the breadboard and rolling pin that my grandmother's uncle made for her wedding gift in 1914. But since I no longer make bread or pie crust, I gave them to a neighbor who does. She knew my grandmother and treasures the memories.

Answer 8

Caution. This blog is guaranteed to make you hungry. Viewer discretion is advised: https://allroadhaverhill.blogspot.com/2021/12/52-ancestors-week-49-homemade.html

Comments

That's the kind of answer I expected for the topic "homemade." Yum. Thanks, Chris

Answer 9

 I have an old bureau (or chest of drawers) that came down in the family.  It is not beautiful.  It was built by my great grandfather, Almon Adams, probably after the farmhouse burned in 1900.  He and grandma Lovina moved off the mountain in Peru, Vermont, and used the insurance money to buy a nice bottom farm in Manchester Depot.  He probably had to recreate a lot of necessities.  No need to buy stuff when you have the wood, and the time in the winter on the farm. 

Grandpa was not a furniture maker.  He was a 19th century farmer, jack of all trades. I just put up a picture of Grandpa on his profile.  It shows him with his maple sap collection equipment, which was also homemade.   https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Adams-5644  That photo is all we have of that sleigh with the wooden sap vat, that I am sure my great grandfather made, probably with the help of his son Elmer and my grandfather.  But I have the bureau.  One these days I will have to downsize.   I know anyone else would look at the bureau and say it should have been put out for junk decades ago.  Maybe another of his great grandchildren will want a homemade heirloom.  So far, no one but me seems interested. 

Comments

I love the photo you posted of Almon Adams.  But it's not the appearance of the bureau, really.  Consider this.  About 20 years ago I knew an older woman who had an antique shop filled with gorgeous glassware, sterling silver, fabulous wood carvings, china, pottery, and so on, collected over a lifetime. She was retired and said when she died her relatives and children told her it was old fashioned junk and she was hording and she should put it in the garbage.  Later I learned that's what happened.  They put the contents of the shop in black garbage bags.  I think you need to find a person like you, Carolyn, who values the past.

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Be sure to take some pictures of the bureau, and of anything else that is worth remembering. But I hope you find someone who will treasure it as you do.

Answer 10

My Serbian grandmother worked from homeoffice as taylor for friends and other people she knew. So I decided to make her profile a bit more accurate and checked the boxes for "no more siblings" and "no more children", because I already had created profiles for all of them.

Answer 11

I've already improved several of my closer relatives who were the first people who came to mind with the theme, Homemade.  My grandmother, Florence Burdge Stuewe, was an excellent seamstress (as were obviously others who have been written about) and looking at old pictures, I don't see anything she wore that she didn't make.  She made precious clothes for me when I was small, until the fateful year she asked my mother for my measurements, made a week's worth of clothing for me -- pants, skirts, tops, dresses, pajamas, and then wouldn't mail them, because she planned to come to Michigan to give them to me (she and my grandfather lived in Cincinnati, Ohio).  Sadly, a year went by before my grandparents were able to visit and none of the beautiful clothes that she had made fit me.  There were not even any that could be altered.  She was very upset, and that was not made any better by my grandfather berating her for being too cheap to mail the package.  Yikes!

For the theme of homemade, I chose another WikiTree orphan, David Shoemaker.  I had several shoemakers in my ancestors, until they decided to pursue other occupations.  David was born in Ohio which was also where he was married, had a family, and died.  He needs children's profiles created as well as his parents' profiles.  He now has a biography and sources.