athenaluna.com » Genealogy

Video of Martin-Morrissette Family Photos

Athena2 — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:43:05 +0000

I’ve had to buy a subscription to Animoto, a video-making website, for work and tarot purposes, so I’m getting plenty of use out of it. All you do is upload photos, pick some music to accompany the video, and the software does the rest. My first family video features my mother’s parents and their ancestors, the Martin, Morrissette and Bourgeois families. (I don’t have any pictures of the Cyr families yet, but I hope to find some someday!)

The photo at right is my grandmother, Flora Morrissette Martin, at about age 14. Doesn’t she look sweet?

Here’s the video!

Ancestry of Marcella Martin and Bud Weber

Athena2 — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:02:06 +0000

Having worked my way through two or three genealogy software products over the years, I am now trying out a simple software that’s been around for a long time – for good reason. The Personal Ancestral File program (or “PAF”, as it is commonly known) was created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and is one of the easiest to use programs available. It was also easy to export my family tree from Ancestry.com to a .GED file type, then import that file into PAF.

As I explain at the top of the Ancestor reports linked to here, this file contains information from other family trees on Ancestry.com that has not been verified yet. Source material information from Ancestry.com is included wherever possible. Some day I hope to replace all the secondary (or tertiary, or greater) sources with copies of primary source material, but I fear that day is long in the future! Until then I’ll keep check the documents on Ancestry.com, as they seem to have the largest selection of records to peruse, and their collection is always growing.

So, without further ado, here are my mother and father’s ancestors: Marcella Martin Weber and Everett (Bud) Weber.

Ancestor Wedding Photos

Athena2 — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:12:44 +0000

A great place to start my long-overdue update of my site is to re-introduce my ancestors’ wedding photos. We’ll start with Bud and Marce, my parents. Aren’t they adorable? I love my Dad’s hair. It has that old-hollywood-movie-star look about it.

Ancestor Trees – 2005

Athena2 — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:04:11 +0000

Note that this post is from 2005 – I’m converting old data into new posts! I hope to update these charts and somehow get them fully onto the web sometime this year.

I’ve put a compilation book up of my latest research going back about 6 generations on the Weber side and the Martin side. The book includes information on the military regiment in Canada that ancestors in several of the older generations belonged to, as well as information on the “Filles du Roi” or “King’s Daughters”, which were young French women who traveled to Canada in the 1600′s to marry the French settlers there. (I’ll update with further generations when I figure out how to do it so it’s not 400 pages long! Also, the compilation is in PDF format, for which you need Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

My Genealogical Naming Practices

Athena2 — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:00:24 +0000

Anyone who’s done research into French-Canadian ancestry knows that the naming conventions are somewhat unique, generally owing to the small number of original settlers and the ensuing large family sizes. The result is that there would be several people living at the same time in the same area, all with the same name. In my genealogy documents I’ve taken a few precautions to help me distinguish individuals within a long list of names.

‘DIT’ NAMES
To help alleviate this problem, the French Canadians would give people a form of nickname that could be based on any one of a number of sources: Where the person was from, what their occupation was, if they were the ‘younger’ one with that name or the ‘older’ one, and so on. These nicknames are called “Dit” names, because the word ‘dit’ means ‘called’ in French, as in, “Catherine (dit LeJeune) Joseph”. I put these Dit names in parentheses within the name, as in the example just shown.

DUPLICATE NAMES
Despite the practice of using “Dit” names, many of my ancestors who gave their children similar names through succeeding generations are difficult to tell apart in a long list of names. Thus, a Jean-Baptiste might name his son Jean-Baptiste, who might also name his son Jean-Baptiste. Also, most of these families have 6 or more children, so there end up being a great many people with the same name. To cut down on the confusion I’ve added short descriptions in parentheses within some people’s name which help establish how a person relates to other individuals within the family tree. In these cases, I tend to use French terms, so I will show examples in both French and English.

When succeeding generations are named the same I use the words ‘grandfather’, ‘father’, and ‘son’.

Jean (grandpere) Baillargeon – (grandfather)

Jean (pere) Baillargeon – (father)

Jean (fils) Baillargeon – (son)

When siblings and children of siblings are hard to tell apart I use ‘daughter of’ and ‘son of’.

Anne (fille de Francois) Brun – (daughter of Francois)

Charles (fils d’Antoine) Brun – (son of Antoine)

Occasionally using ‘father of’ is the more appropriate designation to make things clearer.

Vincent (pere de Sebastien) Brun

ACCENTS
I have elected to leave out accents for purely selfish reasons. Accented names sort differently in the Family Tree Maker program than unaccented names, and until I take the time to go through the entire list and rename everyone, I’ll be leaving the accents off of most names.