Previous Grants Awarded 2005

December 2005
The Holder DNA Project has aided genealogists researching the Holder surname by identifying eleven specific, unrelated Holder lines and aligning related families properly. The majority of American Holder lines commence with emigrants from England to Virginia between 1650-1730, moving south and west through the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and into Oklahoma and Texas, but there are also from the predominant pattern, including Moravian Holders, 19th Century German immigrants, etc. The Project has assisted in untangling these various lines, which often crossed paths geographically and intermarried, creating obstacles to the establishment of solid paper trails.

November 2005
The Friends of the Garden City Historical Museum of Garden City, Michigan bought the Straight Farm House, circa 1866, and are in the midst of an all-volunteer renovation process to open the top floor as a museum and make other spaces available for events, in order to help pay the mortgage and other operating expenses. They’re also orchestrating another fund-raising initiative -- a calendar illustrated with photos of old businesses that once existed in Garden City (a similar calendar last year of grand, old homes was a big success!). This grant will be used in support of their 2006 calendar initiative.

October 2005
This month's grant goes to Jean Scarlott and a group of volunteers who have been photographing and logging old headstones in Caroll County, Jefferson County and Harrison County, Ohio cemeteries. The group has recently embarked upon some restoration projects and this grant will be used to help pay for a headstone to commemorate fifteen coal miners who were killed in a mine explosion on April 21, 1910 in Amsterdam, Ohio. These miners are buried in an unmarked grave in the village of Amsterdam, Ohio, and it was due their deaths that the state of Ohio started paying benefits to widows.

***Update as of December 2005
Here’s an image of what this headstone is projected to look like.



September 2005
A grant has been given to the Louisiana Library Foundation in a fund designated for the repair of damage caused to state libraries by Katrina. Others interested in contributing can learn more at the link provided.

August 2005
For over 130 years, Aoyama Cemetery, a city-owned cemetery located in central Tokyo, has been the eternal resting place of a group of foreigners. They were the missionaries, teachers, doctors, diplomats, engineers, and their families, who contributed to the development of Japan after the Meiji restoration in 1868. The section is separated from the rest of the cemetery and is quite popular with tourists and city residents.

The city of Tokyo has been seeking to increase the amount of park space, and has their eyes on four city-owned cemeteries, including Aoyama. In 2002, a committee of academics and politicians proposed to transform about 40% of the cemetery into a park. Since then, work has been underway toward that goal. In order to clear space, the city needs to remove the graves of delinquent plots - both Japanese and foreign - and move some others. In October 2004, white signs were placed in front of roughly 60% of the foreign plots stating in Japanese that they were delinquent and subject to removal. City bureaucrats recognize the historical significance of the important people buried there and have expressed their intention to protect their memory, but are at the same time hoping to remove those whom they feel are not important.

The Foreign Section Trust, a group of concerned foreigners who recognize that the entire section is an important historical site, is rallying with the intention of preserving all the graves. Although the group would like to pay the maintenance fees, Japanese law states that only family members are allowed to do so. In addition, due to privacy laws, the government refuses to divulge information about those who are responsible for payment of the graves, frustrating efforts to gather information for locating descendants. This grant will be used for research to track down the families of those buried in this cemetery.

July 2005
The Colorado Freedom Memorial Foundation is working to build a monument dedicated to all Colorado veterans killed in action since statehood. This memorial will be a place for families to mourn and celebrate lost loved ones, for children to learn of the noble deeds of lost family members, and for veterans to pay tribute to fallen comrades. A grant has been provided in support of this initiative.

June 2005
The Carpatho-Rusyn Society is supporting schools in the Zakarpatska oblast of Ukraine to teach Rusyn youth their history, culture and language. A total of 14 schools are supported, and this grant will be used to fund one school for a year.







Since May 2005 was our 5th birthday,
we celebrated by awarding 5 grants!

May 2005: #1
A teacher from a school located in Spanish Harlem will use her grant to take her 4th grade students on a field trip to the Tenement Museum, where they will participate in the Confino Program in order to learn about immigration. This living history program focuses on 1916 and the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family. The students are met by a costumed interpreter, playing young Victoria Confino, who welcomes the students as if they are new immigrants who have just arrived on the Lower East Side of NYC. During the program, the students get the opportunity to touch items in the apartment, try on period clothing, and talk to Victoria about her life.

*** Update as of November 2005
See a photo gallery of the trip this class took to the Tenement Museum.



May 2005: #2
Yamhill County Genealogical Society of McMinnville, Oregon has a collection of VHS tapes of local oral histories created in the mid-1970s. Those interviewed were descended from pioneer families and have all passed away since that time. The tapes are rapidly deteriorating, so the society will use this grant to have the contents transferred to DVDs, which will be made available to the public through the genealogy section of the local library.

May 2005: #3
Mark Mugleston wants to discover a means by which hand-written documents can be extracted through computer technology; that is, through computer hardware, programming languages, and scanners. Current software has the capability of scanning and extracting typed digitized documents using OCR. Mark intends to take this same technology and adapt it to hand-written digitized documents to make it possible to scan censuses, probate and vital records, and other hand-written genealogical documents; digitize them; and then be able to search them via a browser over the Internet. He calls this objective "grand, but realistic." So this grant will be used to help nurture his grand, but realistic goal!

May 2005: #4
Scott County Genealogical and Historical Society was fortunate enough to receive a truck load of old photographs from a local newspaper. Wishing to preserve this valuable collection for future generations, the society will obtain acid free sleeves and albums to protect the photos.

May 2005: #5
Art students in a 100% African-American class in Chicago will use art supplies and historical texts furnished by this grant to explore the themes of self-portrait and identity. As their teacher, Ms. Neater, explains, "My students have been labeled many things by other people, including each other. I would like to provide them an opportunity to describe themselves, visually and in writing (in the form of drawings and poems), articulating who they are today." As part of the project, the students will be looking at the work of Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, Carrie Mae Weems, and Dawoud Bey, among others.

April 2005
The Lavaca County Historical Commission will hold its 9th annual Alton C. Allen Historical Conference in October 2005 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII. The theme of the conference is the home-front response to WWII. Pilot training occurred in the area and Lavaca County citizens put up markers whenever airplane crashes occurred that involved the loss of life of Army Air Corps cadets and other flyers. The markers, six in all, have all been located. The Commission is in the process of contacting family members of each flyer and inviting them to attend the conference in honor of their ancestor. This month's grant will support that effort.

*** Update as of September 2005
The 9th Annual Alton C. Allen Historical Conference Committee used the grant toward the purchase of a granite marker to be placed at the site of the last Army Air Corps crash site in Lavaca County during World War II. The last crash, which occurred on August 24, 1944, took the life of A/C James Q. Tingle of Neligh, NE. For some unknown reason, this site was not marked during the 1940s as the previous five sites had been. By installing a marker identical to those at the other five, we feel we have completed the project begun by the citizens of Lavaca County during WWII. The marker was put in place in time for the conference on October 22, 2005. Family members of all 13 flyers who lost their lives were located and many were pleased to have the opportunity to attend the ceremony commemorating the pilots and air cadets. -- Brenda Lincke Fisseler, Lavaca County Historical Commission

March 2005
The active members of the Benton County Genealogical Society of Philomath, Oregon have had a project underway for almost 12 years to index Benton County birth and deaths as reported in the Corvallis newspapers from 1865 to 1926 (approximately 9,700 names to date). Progress has been slower than they'd like due to the need for volunteers to schedule time at the few available microfilm readers in the area, so the society will use this grant to digitize two reels of microfilm to allow volunteers to work from their home computers. This is intended as a trial run to see if digitizing the records will speed up the project - not a bad idea for other societies to mimic!

February 2005
In recent years, the descendants of Chang and Eng, the world's original Siamese twins, have begun holding an annual Bunker family reunion in North Carolina. In addition to family members, a number of writers, researchers, documentarians and others attend in order to delve into the psychological, medical, social and other implications of being a conjoined twin - or a descendant of one. This grant will be used in support of this year's reunion.

January 2005
The American WWII Orphans Network (AWON) helps sons and daughters of Americans killed in WWII to find burial and memorial sites, learn more about their fathers, connect with war buddies, find lost relatives, and learn from others who lost their fathers via an online community and conferences. The organization works to keep the memory of all who died alive and to preserve their stories. A grant was made to cover online database subscriptions in support of their mission.