Reunion Photos and Presentation

Here are links to the photos we took at the family reunion, as well as the visuals I used during my presentation. There are many, many more records than this, and we are updating the links on the right to make them easier to use. Have fun!

Family Reunion

Estell(e) Reunion Presentation Visuals

Family Reunion and Family Tree

This has been an amazing weekend! Jon and I just spent three days with some of the best people in the world: the Estell(e) family! What a blessing it has been for me to do this family research, because it led me to find out about this family reunion and to meet hundreds of cousins I never knew about. We felt loved by everyone, and we look forward to seeing everyone at the next reunion in 2010!

Since many people at the reunion wanted to know more about how we are all connected, we have put up a family tree that should help with that. I will be working on it over the next few weeks, updating it with the information I got at the reunion, and the look may change if we can find a better-looking website. The "home person" (the first person the tree starts with) is my grandmother, Nellie Booker, and following her line up to John Estill will take you to any other Estell(e)s that you want to find. Enjoy getting to know the many, many Estell(e)s, and more!


Click image to access the Estell/Booker/Demps/Magruder Family Tree

Cemetery photos

Family history and genealogy is a lot of fun. In our travels Kristen and I have photographed and transcribed memorials from many cemeteries. Here we share them with the world. I am licensing these photos and transcriptions under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This means you can copy them and use them for any purpose, as long as you give me (Jon Andersen) credit. Please drop me a note if you find your relatives in here, I'd love to hear from you! The original high-res photos are included here. Look under "named_photos" for the high-res versions.

Corinth Cemetery, Sycamore, Talladega, Alabama (High-res download)	Wilson Cemetery, Winterboro, Talladega, Alabama (High-res download)
Detroit Memorial Park East Cemetery, Warren, Macomb, Michigan (High-res download)	Westview Community Cemetery, Pompano Beach, Broward, Florida (High-res download)
St Hedwig Cemetery, Dearborn Heights, Wayne, Michigan (High-res download)	Ayersville Cemetery, Defiance, Ohio (High-res download)
Cole Cemetery, Shorter, Alabama (High-res download)

30th Anniversary of Priesthood Revelation

I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as Mormon. Every now and then I get challenged about my beliefs--among them, how I can be black and be Mormon. I have been a member of this church for almost 10 years; I have attended the church in seven countries on three different continents, and in nine different states. I can say that I have never met more loving, warm, friendly, open, and accepting people anywhere than the Mormons. From the first time I set foot in one of their churches, I felt welcome, and it has been the same every Sunday ever since for all these years.

Every church has their history. This church is no exception. There are all kinds of theories out there about why the priesthood was not extended to all worthy men until 1978, and I don't agree with any of them. But what I do know is that the gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness, along with the power to act in the name of God to administer the ordinances of the gospel, is available to all people on earth who seek it. I believe that we are all equal in the eyes of God and that we always have been, and everything is available to all of us to enable us to return to live with our Father in heaven again, regardless of our race. God loves everyone, black and white and Hispanic and Arab, Mormon and Catholic and Baptist and Muslim and Jewish. And He has invited all people to come unto Him.

So in honor of the 30th anniversary of the revelation on the priesthood, I have posted this video for your enjoyment.

The Tie That Binds

Today is a good day. After much research and many phone calls and no luck in getting Interlibrary Loan to send me genealogical materials, I finally found a copy of Casey W. Arnette's The Tie That Binds: A History of the Alpine Baptist Church for sale. It just came in the mail. The next closest copies of this book are in Macon, Georgia and Auburn, Alabama (over 500 miles away), and now I have the information at my fingertips! What a blessing. So I would like to offer to do lookups for other people, because I realize how difficult it is to get a copy of this book. I am particularly interested in doing lookups for people who are doing research on African-American ancestors, but I will look up names in the index for anyone. My husband is also in the process of trying to contact the author/descendants to see if there is any way that this material can be digitized. (We would be happy to do it!) So if you have stumbled on this blog in search of this book and would like a look-up, post a comment with your email address and I'll do what I can.

Wasting time. . . or am I?

I'm supposed to be going on a camping trip this evening, and since Jon is at work, I have the task of making the preparations for such a trip. Of course, I've never REALLY been camping, so my tendency is to overprepare. But then he sent me a link to itsourtree.com, where we can post our family tree and invite others who are connected to our family to also edit and add information in our family tree. . . .And now my camping preparations have gone out the window. Yes, I set out the tent and blankets and flashlights, and I have some warmer clothes ready to sleep in, but there is still the task of food, and that is the part that will take the most time. Yet I have been sitting here adding almost 200 names, and I am so excited to use the feature where it will just send off emails to my cousins to invite them to claim their spots in the family tree. :) I guess if I'm procrastinating on one responsibility, at least I'm doing something else that's positive. At least that's what I keep telling myself. :) Check it out: www.itsourtree.com

Gandy Dancers

I have been doing research on my great-grandfather, Henry Lewis Demps, Jr., whose job in the early 1920s was to move railroad tracks back into place. These African Americans were sometimes known as "gandy dancers" for the tools they used and perhaps the movement with which they pushed the tracks back in place to the rhythm of the calls. Have a look...

Launch in external player

Compute Graphics

Here is computer graphics!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Flash movies of Hawaii

Here's an old movie of our apartment in Hawaii, updated for the Facebook-era.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

AAU Ward

Maren Hansen made an Alumni website for the Ann Arbor University Ward. I figured, why not register now, you never know when some old friend from the ward will loose our phone number (-;

The AAU Ward "Moving Crew".

Mom in the news

Did you know that Mom was in the newspaper? Yep, well, she's probably been written up many times for plays, etc. Remember that dance number our whole family did, "Stretch marks", for her senior thesis at the University of Michgan? Well, I was googling recently and found it. Have a look-see: http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/nov/11-23-98/arts/arts5.html

Listen to mission music and farewell

How about some more mission multimedia?

On P-Days, Elder Rose liked to play his Gee-tar. Shortly before the incredible Draper Zone was broken up by certain people going home, we recorded some music as a zone. Elder Rose wrote some wonderful music - "Shiloh" is particularly nostalgic, because it expresses his testimony of the Savior, and we performed it in a special missionary fireside of our own organizing. I'm proud of our rendition of "If You Could Hie to Kolob" - For the first verse, I am playing the accompaniment and singing all four parts.

• Shiloh - Composed and sung by Elder Michael Rose (Elder Lassen vocals)
• Ave Maria - Violin by Elder Gary Parente accompanied by Elder Jon Andersen
• If You Could Hie to Kolob - Draper Zone accompanied by Elder Jon Andersen (instrumental only)
• Composition 1 - Composed by Elder Michael Rose
• Composition 2 - Composed by Elder Gary Parante

All of this audio was ripped from CDs. I ripped the mission farewell in iTunes into MPEG-4 audio format (m4a). I ripped Elder Rose's music in Windows Media Player into Windows Media Audio (wma). Those formats aren't the most portable and preservable, however; so I re-encoded them into the standard and well-supported MPEG-3 audio format (mp3) using Xilisoft WMA MP3 Converter (shareware).

Dancing Ryan Montage(s)

I found some Old Timey movies of Ryan dancing. You really should watch them - Ryan has some sweet dance moves! He'll be a star at the single's dances.

• Dancing Ryan #1
• Dancing Ryan #2
• Dancing Ryan #3

To view the movies, you may need to right-click on the movie and save it first. You may also need to install a QuickTime movie viewer in order to view these movies.

The thumbnail images were captured in the QuickTime movie viewer, copy-n-pasted into Word, and then exported from Word as a web page.

P.S. StrongBad also likes to dance.

Kristen Mission Photos

New photos of Kristen's mission, and also a chronological look at her early life...

• Many pictures from Kristen's mission
• Young Kristen, from three to twenty

If you'd like to print any of these pictures, contact us. We have higher resolution images stashed away.

The pictures were organized in Picasa on Windows (you can download it for free), and then exported to HTML.

New picture albums

Vacation continues... And so we've organized and uploaded a bunch of pictures. Check them out!

• The latest from the Sunny Shores of Hawaii (Thanksgiving and Graduation)
• Our Engagement & Wedding
• Mission pics
• Miscellaneous Makeovers

If you'd like to print any of these pictures, contact us. We have higher resolution images stashed away.

The pictures were organized in iPhoto on my Mac, and then exported to HTML through the BetterHTMLExport plugin.

Hawaii Video Tour

We figured out how to use my video conferencing camera to take movies for you! If you were here, we'd give you a tour of our place; but since you're not, here is a virtual tour.

P.S. Mom, these videos are for you. Now you can check on the living conditions of your son and daughter-in-law (-;

• Movie of Living Room
• Movie of House Innerds
• Movie of Deck and Ocean View
• Movie of Entrance Jungle

If you can't see the videos, try downloading and installing DivX. If that doesn't work, email me (-;

Wonder how I did it? These movies were taken with my Apple iSight camera, using the Boinx iVeZeen movie capture software. They were then recompressed to DivX using Bink Video's Rad Video Tools.

Blogging

BLOGGER I just found out about blogging. Perhaps I can use this as my bookmarks list, so that my favorite sites are available to me everywhere. Cool!

First post

First post (-:!