The New York Ditti

One of my avocations is researching the genealogy of the Dittus family in New York City. My ancestors came to New York from a small town in Germany. It is called Schömberg, and is in Neuenbürg Oberampt, in Württemberg. It is a lovely little spa town in the Black Forest that I visited in the summer of 1999. The Michael and Christina (nee Kling) Dittus family emigrated to the US around 1846.

My ancestor in this little family was Jacob - Johann Jacob Friederich Dittus. He married Barbara Frey, also from Germany, and they had 7 kids before he was killed in a wagon accident near 59th Street in 1867. Jake and Babs lived around 7/8th Aves at 117th Street intersection. Babs subsequently remarried, Anton Rieger, and the family moved to (the former) Newtown in Queens where several Rieger children were also produced.

The Ditti were fairly prolific. The original Michael and Christina family had 5 kids. Babs and Jake had 7. Jake's sibling, Michael had 6. (I think that they are the group that moved to Brooklyn and later on to Roundout and Kingston, NY.) A lot of Babs' and Jake's descendants stayed in the Middle Village area, especially through the mid 20th century. It is very hard sorting through all of the various descendants to figure out who married who and to which family line they belonged. The families were fairly large and they used a lot of the same names.

I spent a lot of time a number of years ago when I was actively researching, at the New York City Archives. I went through the marriage, birth and death indices searching for possible relatives with various spellings (or mispellings) of the surname Dittus. I may not know where all of these individuals fit in to my family but I've got their information just in case they do. Here is a link to my spreadsheet in Google Docs for anyone to use.

Early March 2011

We are now into the final countdown of weeks before spring. We’ve had some intermittent warm weather. Saturday was mild and in the mid sixties. Yesterday was still fairly mild, but rainy. Today, everything looks fresh and clean. It is currently 34⁰ and quite windy. We'll see what the day brings in the way of a warm up.

In the 2+ weeks since our family reunion in the Poconos, the yard has lost its snow cover. Ours was one of the first to uncover. Now the shoots of some of the bulbs, as well as the green tips of the daylilies and other hardy plants are appearing. On Saturday, I saw my first bulbs blooming - there is a small patch of snowdrops beneath the magnolia tree. Just perfect! See picture following:

On Saturday, I began some of the spring yard cleanup. Sticks and branches were picked up and removed from around the yard. I pruned the "Monster that Devoured Cleveland" (My name for our Sweet Autumn Clematis) on the side of the house and started the bed cleanup. I also pruned the magnolia - getting rid of some crossing branches and the two big branches (sprouts) coming from the bottom. In addition, I gathered my courage and pruned the curly willow. I have come to the conclusion that it will get too big if left unpruned. So, I cut it back totally to within 12 inches from the ground. We will see what it looks like and if it becomes a nice shrub. If not, it's got to go. I can't use a large willow tree that close to the house in front of my window.

Libraries Will Survive

I found this great video on the state of libraries today from the folks at Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Virginia. A fantastic approach to keeping our chins up in tough times.

Web 2.0 technologies

I am busy today preparing for my Web 2.0 class tonight. It looks as though we will have a full house. I hope that users will find it useful. Some of the technologies are terrific. It is so hard to choose between them to decide which to demonstrate. I also really like some of the newer ones like Scribd.com. I hope that it is enough to get them started.

Filling in the online tree at Ancestry.com

My family history research has been progressing slowly over the past month or so. I had been having a bit of a hiatus in my research efforts but the request for an introductory genealogy class at work has reignited my interest. I have been working on getting more of my tree on the web using the resources at Ancestry.com. It is duplicative work - I already have my extensive tree in Family Tree Maker, but duplicating that work allows me to connect more easily with other researchers.

Count Down to Web 2.0

Tuesday night I'm teaching my first Web 2.0 class and I am still madly scrambling to get ready. I have a Facebook account and while I see some of the positive aspects to it, I still don't think that I need to know all of the things that were posted by my Friends [sorry _:( ]. I also see no reason to stay hyper-connected with Twitter - one of the social networking tools that is super popular. No one needs, or wants, to know what I am doing constantly. So, while I love many of the Web 2.0 apps, I will have a hard time exclaiming positively about some of them. But, to each his own.

Web 2.0 presentation

I have been furiously working on a presentation about the best Web 2.0 sites to add to my library's computer classes for the public. One of the hardest parts of this is limiting my choices to a reasonable number of sites that I can discuss in a 2 hour program and then follow up with a hands on section of one or two technologies. Obviously, setting up a blog is a bit too long. I am going to focus on librarything, tadalist, and perhaps Shutterfly...
More to follow.