Czudek & Chudek Genealogy

Well the Facebook experiment is moving forward nicely. This application appears to be "the place" to be for social interaction with family and friends. I have managed to setup several groups and pull people together with common interests. The first was the "Chudek & Czudek - THE Rodina" group. I have rounded up over 30 Facebook users who carry this family surname or are blood related. Every so often I'll use the search tool to see if more people with our name sign up. I then send them an invitation to participate.

The second group I created was for the original Marketing Technologies team at Target, Mervyn's, and Dayton's/Marshall Fields. I guessing more than half of all the people employed in our group at one time or another have signed into this group. I have posted some photos from the different team outings.

In the Ham Radio arena I hooked up with my long lost friend, Dave Barnard who was a friend in the early 1960's. He's living in San Diego, CA at the moment and we have exchanged notes about the 40+ years that we grew up together, apart.

I have been learning advanced Excel skills and have created some tools for the radio community. This allows operators to analyze their logbooks after contests and view charts and graphs regarding their performance during different contests. Some of these Excel workbooks have become pretty complex.

I was ask to help create a station/operator scheduling tool for the team that will be activating the Descheho Island, about 40 miles NW of Puerto Rico starting 7-Feb-2009 and going for 2 weeks. This is a major DXpedition that will have 10 full time stations on the air and two teams of operators. Scheduling a event like this has been done manually in the past. I'll be anxious to hear the feedback whether this new tool was a help for this task.

This weekend (7-Feb-2009) is the Minnesota QSO Party. It's a 10 hour event where all 87 counties will be activated by fixed and mobile HF stations. The goal is to try and log every county during the contest. I built another Excel tool to help the mobile stations plan their activities and avoid excessive duplication of effort in some of the counties. There will be about a dozen mobile stations who plan to visit 10 to 20 counties each. The highly populated counties will be activated by fixed stations. Mobile stations can redirect their effort to the sparsley populated areas of the state. All of this planning comes together in the Excel workbook designed for this purpose.

I've been spending a lot of time in front of the computer lately. And about a month ago the main backup drive with all our digital photos died. I'm working to resurrect that disk drive to retrieve the photos and movies. When this is accomplished, all this information will be copied to DVDs to avoid this kind of trouble in the future. I will also implement a basic RAID solution so if there is another drive failure in the future the data will be safer.

It's fall, the leaves are gone, the garden is turned in for the year. There has been one snow flurry but nothing has stuck. Actually, it has been pretty warm the past few days, in the mid to upper 60's. A reprieve to finish the fall chores before winter sets in.

I've been busy on Facebook, rounding up all the Chudek and Czudek families I can find. There's quite a group of us over there now, and from all corners of the world. If you haven't tried Facebook, you should. It's the leading social network on the internet and it's free to join in all the fun.

I occasionally get back here to add more information but unfortunately I'm not too consistent about it.

This summer (2008) I joined the Chisago County Historical Society. Their research library is located in Lindstrom, MN and contains a wealth of genealogical information regarding the pioneers and descendants. They were predominately Swedish and some German immigrants who settled this area in the 1850's. The library holds books, lists, family histories, and other materials created by local historians and writers.

All of this information is in hard copy form (printed) and not accessible on a computer or via the internet. I have begun a "digitization" project to help bring some of the important information online. One source of genealogy information in their library are death records and cemetery interments. There have been  Society volunteers who have collected and cataloged this information for many years. It was easy to choose these records to receive the first attention.

I broke the project into several phases. The first was to gauge the acceptance to making the information available via the internet in the first place. The concept and samples I created were received with enthusiasm and I received encouragement to proceed. The second phase was to determine an effective method to host the data. The Society has a basic web presence on a single HTML page that is managed by a local ISP. Developing an expanded website coupled with maintenance issues was discarded (for the moment) in favor of using a popular website called www.findagrave.com

This is a free web service that hosts cemetery interment records. It also includes the ability to add photographs, biographies, and other pertinent information for genealogy research. I posted some basic samples and showed this concept to some of the Board members. This idea was also accepted and approved.

Until now, there had been no organized effort to create the official Chisago County cemetery list on this site. It was necessary to move some cemetery listings out of Chisago County and into the appropriate county. I found several "made up" cemetery names where the interments needed to be transferred into the proper cemetery. Several cemeteries need to be consolidated or merged together. There are a few pending corrections that will be resolved when the administrative queue on the website is completed.

During this process I traveled to each location and photographed the signage and gates. In addition, the GPS coordinates for each cemetery were added to the website listings. The next phase was to start posting the interments.

Interments can be added to the website manually, one at a time. Many people choose this method, especially if they are listing family members and including obituaries, photos, and biographies. The other option is a batch process. A spreadsheet is populated with basic information such as Name, Date of Birth, and Date of Death. The spreadsheet is uploaded to the website and is processed during the next batch process cycle, usually less than one week.

I reviewed the 40+ cemeteries and decided to work through the list from the smallest to the largest. I started with the Glader Cemetery south of Lindstrom and the Old Lutheran Cemetery in Harris, MN. Both of these sites are "full", where no additional interments will be made. Using my digital camera I made photographs of every visible marker in these cemeteries, created a spreadsheet, and uploaded the information. When the interments came online, I uploaded the proper photos for each interment.

This worked fine, but it became apparent that a lot of time was be needed to upload photographs one at a time. I solicited advice from the site owner, Jim Tipton, and he told me it was possible to bulk load photographs too. This was not an advertised feature because it required some manipulation beyond the normal processes established for the website. In general, here's how it works: I create the spreadsheet and upload it normally. After the interments are posted I download the listings form the website. This step adds the Unique Identifier Code to the spreadsheet for each record. I then populate the spreadsheet with the image filename(s) for each record. I send this new spreadsheet in CSV format directly to Jim. In the meantime, I down-sample my original 1 ~ 2 Mb images to the requisite < 250-Kb file size. I then upload these images to an FTP website where Jim can down load them direct. At his end he coordinates my spreadsheet and image files for uploading into the system.

All the pieces are in place to bring the records online with minimal manual involvement. It works and save a tremendous amout of time at my end.

So the project continues... photographing, transcribing, auditing against existing records, uploading spreadsheets and photos. I estimate there are 30,000 or more records that will go online during the next year. Some Chisago County Historical Society members have vounteered to help with the photogrpahy. When considering a person might average 1 photograph per minute, this project represents 500 hours of photography work in itself. The additional transcription and image manipulations will probably add another 1,500 hours of work.

The final result will be an up-to-date audit, data that is accessible worldwide, and photo documentation for validation. Although adding obituaries or biographies are out of scope in this project, family members can add this informtion if they choose to do so.