Wordless Wednesday

 Wordless Wednesday...

Estel and Alta Dillman ca. 1941 in Sheffield, SD. Scanned from original negative.

 This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2013 by Daniel G. Dillman

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday...

Alta, Robert and Althea Dillman on the Day farm at Sheffield, SD.  Ca. 1941, scanned from original negative.

 
This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2013 by Daniel G. Dillman

Wordless Wednesday - Alta May Day

Alta May Day circa 1991, last formal portrait.

This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2013 by Daniel G. Dillman

On This Day - Feb 12th

On This Day...

1632 - Birth: Sarah Foote, Ipswich, Suffolk, England

1815 - Birth: Frederick Day, Sheffield, Lorain County, Ohio

1855 - Birth: Michael Kunkel, Rothenbach, Germany

1859 - Death: Johann Heinrich Kunkel, Henry County, Georgia

1876 - Birth: Cora Belinda Jones, Winn Parish, Louisiana

1881 - Birth: Ada Lee Sullivan, Louisiana

1885 - Marriage: John W. Straughan and Jemimah Hattie Dillman, Crawford County, Indiana

1908 - Marriage: Norman McQueen and Ella Belle James, Clinton, East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana

1910 - Birth: Alta May Day, Sheffield, Beadle County, South Dakota

1931 - Marriage: Estel Elmer Dillman and Alta May Day, Huron, Beadle County, South Dakota

1937 - Death: Barbara Rosenbaum, Saint Cloud, Stearns County, Minnesota

1939 - Death: Louisa Ann Kremer, Saint Cloud, Minnesota

1979 - Burial: Tina Adeline Dillman, White Lick Cemetery, Mooreseville, Morgan County, Indiana

1910 - My paternal grandmother Alta May Day was born.  She who was responsible for getting me involved in family history.  She whose photographic negatives I have recently scanned and posted here.  She died in 1992.  Happy birthday, Grandma!



This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2013 by Daniel G. Dillman

Wordless Wednesday - Farming

Harvesting the crop circa 1929.  Scanned from original negatives.  Sheffield, Beadle County, South Dakota.


This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2013 by Daniel G. Dillman

It Runs In The Family...

Marian Pierre-Louis of Marian's Roots and Rambles once posted an interesting exercise.  As genealogists, we sometimes find traits or skills that seem to crop up along family lines, things we pass along from generation to generation.   Her exercise was to leave a note to her descendants describing her traits, so that they might know which, if any, traits they got from her.

As we are researching our ancestors it's fun to make a discovery that one of them may have had similar interests or avocations that we have. Maybe you're an artist and you discover that your ancestor was too. Or maybe you have a long line of teachers in your family. Certain traits and passions seem to carry through the generations.

If you could leave a note for your descendants, which traits would you tell them about yourself? Leave a comment below or write a post on your own blog.

Here's mine:

I'm a photographer.  No, not professionally, although I did spend six years in the US Navy as a Photographer's Mate, essentially a professional military photographer.

I started borrowing my parents' cameras as a kid.  Just the usual happy snapshots with no skill or knowledge of how to take better pictures.  In high school, I took a couple of photography classes that were offered, learning the basic camera skills and even how to process my own black & white film and prints, back before the days of digital cameras.  In college, I took some more classes, including an art class where I was looking to learn the more creative side of photography, not just the technical skills.  Alas, things changed, and I got realistic about my abilities and skills, and my career choice went off to computers instead of cameras.  But I still have a DSLR camera with extra lenses, I still go out and shoot from time to time.

So how does that fit with the exercise mentioned above?  Well, my father enjoyed photography.  He had a number of different film cameras over the years, and even an 8mm movie camera.   But even more, his mother, my maternal grandmother, Alta May Day, was an avid photographer.  She took many hundreds of photos, back when each frame was costly in terms of film and processing, and never knowing until you got that done whether the image turned out or not.  I have albums full of her photos, which she helpfully put in order and labeled with names, places and dates.  What's more, I have the actual negatives for many of these, going back to 1910 or so.

Since my grandmother was born in 1910, that means someone earlier had to have started that photo collection.  Her father, my great-grandfather Clyde Day, was also into photography.  As he lived out on the South Dakota prairie, that was not an easy hobby to have!  He learned how, and got the equipment needed, to process his own film and prints back when photography was still rather young.

Prior to that, I don't have any evidence of anyone in the family doing photography, but they were interested in pictures, as there are portraits and family photos of the Day line that go back to the Civil War and before.

So if you're my descendant and reading this, are you photographically inclined?  What equipment are you using?  How has photography changed?


This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2011 by Daniel G. Dillman

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Veterans Day (Late!)

I know I'm over a week late with this, but I'm going to participate anyway!  Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings put out his usual fine quality Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge last week:

Is the bloom off of the Genea-Rose here?  There has been very poor participation in SNGF the last two weeks, likely because the tasks were too hard or too esoteric.  I'll try to fix that this week!

(No, Randy, at least on my part, the problem has been lack of time, more than anything else.  I'll admit on a couple of occasions the challenge just didn't fit or apply to me or my family, so I skipped those.  But mostly I've just been busy lately.  Keep 'em coming!

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  To celebrate Veterans Day, pick one of your ancestors or relatives with a military record and a gravestone.

2)  Tell us about your ancestor's military service.

3)  Tell us about your ancestor's gravestone - where is it, what is the inscription, when were you last there?  Show us a picture of it if you have one available. 

4)  Write your own blog post about this ancestor and his gravestone, or share it in a Comment to this blog post, in a status line on Facebook, or in a Google Plus Stream post. 

Here's mine:

My ancestor of choice is Estel E. Dillman, my paternal grandfather.  I've written about him several times before.  He's easily the best-documented of my ancestors when it comes to military service, and I recently made a trip out to his gravesite.

Estel was the product of a dysfunctional home, his father left home after his mother died in 1920, and Estel and brothers were taken in by the Sacksteder family in New Albany, Indiana.  Estel's sister Reva was taken in by someone else.  Estel's older brother Orville Wayne fudged his age on the papers and enlisted in the Navy early to escape the family situation.  Estel followed suit a few years later.  I've recently been piecing together more of that time period.  I have a copy of the paper Mrs. Sacksteder signed to vouch for Estel when he enlisted.  It includes their address at the time.  He enlisted for the same reason as Wayne, to get out of that family situation and make something of himself.  He enlisted in 1927, at age 19.

His service record papers include pages on which he states his intention of making the Navy a career, but we know that sometimes life events have a way of changing our plans.  While in the Navy, he met a man named Jack Cornett from Beadle County, South Dakota.  Jack liked to hear news from home, and so became a pen pal to Alta May Day, who would later become my grandmother.  At some later point, Jack introduced Estel to Alta, and the two became an item.  Estel got out of the Navy and moved to South Dakota to marry and make a life with Alta.  They were married in February 1931.

What with the Depression and all, things just didn't go that well for Estel and Alta, so he decided to go back into the Navy to help boost their nest egg.  He re-enlisted in 1937.  In late 1941 the United States entered World War II, and Estel remained on active duty.  He served until the end of the war, and would have stayed in had the Navy honored a pledge to let Estel serve stateside.  However, he got wind of their plans to station him in Japan, where his family could not live with him, and so he took advantage of the draw down in forces following the war to leave the Navy and head back to South Dakota.  Within a couple of days of his return to Huron, South Dakota, he had a firm job offer from the local power plant.

Estel and Alta's grave marker is in Restlawn Cemetery, a few miles south of Huron, South Dakota.  I visited the site about a week before Veterans Day and took this picture:

Estel E. and Alta M. Dillman grave marker in Restlawn Cemetery, Huron, Beadle County, South Dakota.

This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2011 by Daniel G. Dillman

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History - Grandparents' House

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts (one for each week of 2011) that invite genealogists and others to record memories and insights about their own lives for future descendants. You do not have to be a blogger to participate. If you do not have a genealogy blog, write down your memories on your computer, or simply record them on paper and keep them with your files.

• Week 31: Grandparents’ House. Describe your grandparents’ house. Was it big or small? How long did they live there? If you do not know this information, feel free to describe the house of another family member you remember from your childhood.

My grandparents Estel and Alta Dillman lived at 1603 Pearl Street in Yankton, Yankton County, South Dakota for several decades.  It was a small pink house with two bedrooms on the main floor.  It had an eat-in kitchen with a door to the driveway.  The living room was also on the main floor, and there was one bathroom.  The living room had a large picture window that looked out to the street, and a door to the sidewalk, but no one used that door, they all came to the kitchen door on the side.  The major items in the living room were the console television and an old upright piano.  The basement was open with concrete block walls.  It had two beds, a dresser and an armoir in one corner for a makeshift bedroom, which was where my brother and I slept when we visited.  My parents had one of the main floor bedrooms.  The laundry was also in the basement, and some storage space. 

There was a single-car detached garage.  The garage and driveway were adjacent to the neighbors' driveway and garage, making for a pretty big space to be cleared after snowstorms.  The yard wasn't huge, but was decent.  There were several trees in the back yard, and my grandmother always grew flowers, most notably tulips, in several areas around the house.  She took after her mother in that.


This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2011 by Daniel G. Dillman

Wordless Wednesday - Blanche Bieger & Alta Day

Blanche Bieger & Alta Day ca. 1929, hand colored.

 

Wordless Wednesday – a great way to share your old family photos! Create a post with the main focus being a photograph or image. Some posters also include attribute information as to the source of the image (date, location, owner, etc.). Wordless Wednesday is one of the longest running “memes” in the blogosphere and is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.

This and all other articles on this blog are © copyright 2011 by Daniel G. Dillman

Wordless Wednesday - Alta May Day

Mrs. Estel E. Dillman, Alta May Day. Hand colored.

Wordless Wednesday – a great way to share your old family photos! Create a post with the main focus being a photograph or image. Some posters also include attribute information as to the source of the image (date, location, owner, etc.). Wordless Wednesday is one of the longest running “memes” in the blogosphere and is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.

Fearless Females - Trading Card

March 29 - Create a free Footnote Page or a Genealogy Trading Card at Big Huge Labs for a female ancestor. Some of you may have created your own card back in September 2009 following Sheri Fenley’s post over at The Educated Genealogist. This time, the card is for your female ancestor. Tell us about who you've selected and why and then post a link to what you've created.

I took the Big Huge Labs route and created a trading card for my paternal grandmother, Alta May Day. She was the grandparent I knew best, the one I got to spend the most time with.  She's the one who got me on the family history track.  She's the one who left us copious written memoirs and pictures, arranged by date in albums, so that we can remember who came before us, and what their lives were like.

Fearless Females - Diaries, Journals & Letters

March 8 — Did one of your female ancestors leave a diary, journal, or collection of letters? Share an entry or excerpt.

I've written before that my paternal grandmother Alta May (Day) Dillman wrote memoirs and left them for us.  Something just over 1000 pages of manuscript, all written from her memories, as aided by the extensive photo albums she also left.  And yes, I do realize what a huge treasure this is...

In addition, grandma was a prolific letter writer.  When I was younger, she used a typewriter.  I remember seeing the machine on visits, but at this distance I couldn't tell you if it was a manual or electric.  Grandma would probably have been an early computer adopter, but she died in 1992, before most people had computers.  I think she would have been fascinated by the communications opened up by computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and the Internet.  Eventually, she switched to hand-written letters.  I'm not sure why, if the typewriter broke or she had trouble using it for some reason. 

I do have a number of letters I received from her.  She usually wrote on stationery, sometimes with a holiday design on it.  Always blue ink.  And her handwriting was learned in the 19-teens and twenties, and was occasionally difficult to decipher.  She had a habit of filling the pages, then squeezing extra into what little margin she had left.  That makes it hard to transcribe in a way that leaves a feel for how the page was laid out.

The first pages of her memoirs consist of a brief history of Sheffield, Beadle County, South Dakota, where she was born and raised.  It runs to just over three pages of text with a small plat map and a half-page hand-drawn map of Sheffield.  I've made a PDF file of it.  Since the blog format doesn't allow a PDF file to be embedded, I'll just include the text here.  It'll make for a long post, but I found it to be an interesting read as it not only describes the town, but several of the inhabitants as well.

History of Sheffield, South Dakota

by Alta May Day

On January 1st, 1909, Clyde Wyman Day and Ida May Thurston of the Shue Creek area northeast of Huron drove to Huron and were united in Holy Matrimony by a minister at his office in Huron, South Dakota.

Their new home was to be their home for the rest of their married lives excepting for 3 or 4 years from 1911 to 1915 when they lived several different places for a year each.

Although I always knew the address as Sheffield those first years of life on this farm, I find Sheffield was not platted, and named as a village until April of 1910.  And I was born at this farm February 12th, 1910. I had always taken it for granted that Sheffield was in existence long before I was born.

My grandfather, Frank Milo Day, bought this half-section of South Dakota farmland as an investment, and after renting it to several other families, my father decided he would like to rent the farm. He had been homesteading land in Lyman County, South Dakota, which turned out to be very poor country to farm in. It was ranch grassland west of the Missouri River and my father was a farmer, not a rancher.

After farming, and growing up on a farm near Weeping Water, Nebraska until he was 21 years old, South Dakota was really a come down after that beautiful southern Nebraska farm country. But he was a determined – what you'd call a very determined – sort of Englishman Make a go of it, or know why!

My mother was born and raised on a farm in Shue Creek area about 16 miles northeast of Huron so when she came to the Sheffield farm she didn't have any delusions of what her married farm life was going to be. Lots of hard work and determination.

At 28 and 25, they weren't exactly what you would call young ones anymore.

My grandfather Day decided to plat a small town and call it Sheffield after the city in England where his ancestors were born.

He decided the best place for it would be on the north side of the farm as there was a township road there and the Great northern Railroad track was just to the north of the road. The railroad owned a plot of property to the north of the road and between the rail line. They had a depot there and a new row of coal sheds, and to the west a quarter of a mile was a grain elevator, and just east of the depot was another grain elevator. The elevator company bought several of the lots in the newly plotted Sheffield and built a house and outbuildings there for the family who operated their elevator.

Then a family built a general grocery store, and the government gave them the right to operate the post office for Sheffield. This family also bought a lot next door west of their store and built a nice two-story home on it. They also dug a really good 100-foot well which yielded very good-tasting soft water. This well served the whole village of Sheffield for all the years I knew the town. There may have been 6 or 7 families in Sheffield at the start, but from the time I was about five and can remember about things there were never more than four families in the town.

There were living quarters in the back end of the grocery store and at times a family lived there and operated the store and post office. This was still horse and buggy days. People were just starting to buy Model T Fords. They were so new-fangled yet at that time.

The first people I remembered as Sheffield residents were the John York family. He ran the store and they had a nice two-story home built next door west of the store. They had two older sons, a daughter and a younger son.

The elevator family were Alec Kyle, his wife and little daughter. Mrs. Kyle was the neighborhood piano teacher.

The fourth resident of Sheffield was an elderly widow who had a nice cottage and small acreage to the west corner of the town. She kept a cow for milk. Her name was Davis.

Yorks also had a barn for their cow, and the pony the kids had to drive to school. They used the vacant lots for pasture. Their barn also had a good-sized ice house where they kept the ice they needed for their big ice box that they kept perishables in at the store.

As soon as there became a demand for gasoline, Yorks installed a gas pump. Some of the neighbor women made butter and sold to the store along with the eggs most of them had to sell to help buy their grocery staple supplies. And about that time they started selling what we called “boughten bread” at the store.

John York was a man who liked to be outdoors a lot and being cooped up in that store didn't suit his liking at all so he sold the store to a young couple. They only stayed with the store about three years as he had a chance to work as a grocery traveling salesman, and she couldn't raise a baby, and small child, and tend store too, so they sold the store to one of our local young couples who did the most for the store of any of the owners.. As so many of our farm families were milking 8 or 9 cows and had cream to sell, they decided to both take the course for testing for butterfat so they could buy cream. My folks had been milking 8 or 9 cows, and that meant we had about 5 gallons of cream to sell twice a week. We had been taking our can or cans of cream to the depot about every 3 days and shipping it by train to Huron. For us who only lived half a mile from Sheffield that wasn't bad, but some of those families lived as much as 6 or 7 miles away. It meant so much to be able to take their cream to Sheffield any time convenient instead of having to be there in the evening when the train came through to go to Huron. You could take your cans home as soon as they were emptied instead of having to wait until they came back from Huron empty.

What was funny when the Rural Free Delivery mail route came through from Huron our farm was right on the road it came by. So we no longer got our mail at Sheffield. There were only about 4 families who got mail from the Sheffield Post Office who were lucky enough to be on the new mail route. It was to be sometime when I was about 20 before the Sheffield Post Office was disbanded and the other patrons put on a Cavour route, or extension of the one we had been on so many years (Route 3).

I do not know the exact date this town was discontinued. Bill and Genevieve Welty were the last store owners. Jake and Grace Kauf also built a store, and ran the post office several years, but the post office was discontinued when the Rural Route was extended north and east of Huron and Cavour so Jake turned his store building into an automobile repair shop. And the Welty's discontinued the store they owned and moved to the old Steinhoff Farm across the road from us. Bill sold the store building in two pieces – one was moved to the Jake Arbiter farm and the other to the Dave Glanger farm. They used them for granaries. Yorks moved to Huron about 1935 and left their house vacant for some years. It was the only place left there when Kauf's moved to Huron in a few years - they sold their buildings to be moved. The No. 2 elevator burned in 1943 and the company sold the house to removed.

So by 1950 the area was just a bunch of dead trees and cement foundations and several basements. My father, Clyde, the farm owner and Wayne McDonald, the farm renter finally cleared the [Sheffield town] land and my father got court orders to return it back to active tax lists as a part of the farm again.

Sheffield goodbye.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History - Disaster!

Week 10: Disasters. Did you experience any natural disasters in your lifetime? Tell us about them. If not, then discuss these events that happened to parents, grandparents or others in your family.

I'm happy to say I've never had what I'd call  disaster happen to me or my family.  Living in Minnesota, we have always had interesting weather, and spent time in the basement waiting out tornadoes, but nothing ever came too close.  I do remember a time when I was young that a tornado did hit a mobile home park (why do they always target those?) but that was on the far side of town.

My paternal grandmother Alta May (Day) Dillman wrote and photographed about a tornado that went through their farm at Sheffield, Beadle County, South Dakota on 20 Aug 1934.

Dillman Cottage after Aug 1934 tornado.  Wreckage is from another structure.

Clyde W. Day's barn destroyed by tornado on 20 Aug 1934.

Fortunately, no one in either of the houses on the farm was hurt.  The barn was replaced the following year.

Wordless Wednesday - Ida May (Thurston) Day & Alta May Day

Alta May Day and her mother, Ida May (Thurston) Day, 1914

Wordless Wednesday – a great way to share your old family photos! Create a post with the main focus being a photograph or image. Some posters also include attribute information as to the source of the image (date, location, owner, etc.). Wordless Wednesday is one of the longest running “memes” in the blogosphere and is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.

Fearless Females

March 1 — Do you have a favorite female ancestor?

My favorite female ancestor from a genealogy perspective would have to be my paternal grandmother, Alta May (Day) Dillman.  I've featured her before.  She's the one who got me started in family history.

Thanks, Grandma!

Wordless Wednesday - Clyde W. Day & Alta May Day

Clyde W. Day and Alta May Day circa 1917

Wordless Wednesday – a great way to share your old family photos! Create a post with the main focus being a photograph or image. Some posters also include attribute information as to the source of the image (date, location, owner, etc.). Wordless Wednesday is one of the longest running “memes” in the blogosphere and is an ongoing series at GeneaBloggers.

Wedding Wednesday - Estel Elmer Dillman & Alta May Day

Estel Elmer Dillman & Alta May Day, married 12 Feb 1931

This is the wedding photograph of my paternal grandparents, Estel Elmer Dillman and Alta May Day.  They were married on 12 Feb 1931 in Huron, Beadle County, South Dakota.  The photograph is hand colored by Alta, who was an amateur photographer who also liked to hand color pictures.

They got married fairly soon after Estel's first discharge from the US Navy (he would re-enlist for WW II  after Pearl harbor) and the couple needed a place to live, so they built a small house on the south end of  Alta's father's farm in nearby Sheffield.  This was convenient, as Estel began working the farm with Clyde Day despite being a city boy.  I know he got some serious on-the-job training, trying to farm the Dakota plains in the depression.

Wedding Wednesday – a great way to display those old wedding photos or scan wedding invitations and announcements! Suggested by Carol of Reflections from the Fence and in use by several genealogy bloggers.  (Blurb shamelessly stolen from Thomas McEntee at Geneabloggers.)