Family History Guest Blogging

I'm a regular reader and commenter at a couple of Mormon history blogs, and one of them asked me to do a guest post about Bryant's father (Katie's grandfather), Thomas Lyons, and his family's return trip from Canada via covered wagon in 1914. The posting goes up tomorrow, Tuesday March 16th, at 6:30 AM MDT, 5:30 PDT for anyone who is interested. Here's the link if you want to check it out and even maybe make a comment: www.keepapitchinin.org.

NewFamilySearch or Genealogy Wikipedia

So I've looked up what I thought I knew about our family in the new NewFamilySearch.org, and found that some well meaning but uninformed individual has substituted a Polish spelling of Folkmann (Folchman) and resubmitted a bunch of the work to be done (again!). Not to quibble, but I've seen the microfilms of the Bornholm parish records, and even though the handwritten script is hard to decipher, I don't think there is any way it could be mistaken for Folchman. Let's just say that my experience with NewFamilySearch has been somewhat underwhelming.

However, that prompted me to do some more research on the Real Folkman's (Folkmann, or Volkmann) and where they perhaps came from in Germany. I found a lot of interesting history about Bornholm online. The Island, although traditionally Danish, and speaking a regional dialect of Danish, has been tossed about between kingdoms and owners a bit like a tennis ball at the US Open. Bornholm also has a bit of a reputation of being a difficult place to rule if you are a foreign invader, and has seen several revolts over the centuries, all aimed at restoring the Baltic island to Denmark.

Apparently, in one such interlude, the King of Denmark ceded Bornholm on a 50 year lease from 1525 to 1575 to Lubeck of the Hanseatic League, a loose coalition of merchant city-states in what we would call Northern Germany today. German merchants and mercenaries from Lubeck ruled the island of Bornholm for that 50 years, which undoubtedly saw a lot of back and forth migration from Germany to Bornholm and back. Later, in the 17th century, Bornholm fell under Swedish rule for a while, but the Folkmann's were firmly embedded in Bornholm by that time.

Doing a google search for Folkmann/Volkmann/Lubeck turned up a lot of hits, including a street named Volkmann, and a number of current residents named Volkmann. That's about as far as I have gotten, but at least it tells me where in Germany we might want to start looking for Volkmanns related to our Bornholm Folkmanns. We know that parish records didn't exist prior to about 1600 in Bornholm, but my hope is that the Lubeck merchants, perhaps motivated by profits, may have kept some better records of who traveled back and forth, and that we might get some mention of Jakob or Thomas Folkmann or Volkmann (but not Folchman).

Still here...

Most of you should have received our Christmas letter by now (or certainly sometime this week), but we are still here. Needless to say, we've been mostly absent from the blog and facebook of late. Part of that certainly has to do with the fact that Kate got called as Relief Society president in our ward, and I'm still serving as High Priest group leader, so we've been busy recently. I joke about it, but I am starting to feel like the third counselor in RS, trying to help Kate out as much as possible. With working full time, the RS commitment is overwhelming a lot of the time, but she has really put a lot of effort into it, and I hear a lot of positive feedback from other ward members.

In spite of the recession, I am just finishing my best sales month ever at my job, which kind of surprised me, but I'll take it. It sure beats out having a terrible month.

One other quick note before I get back to work. A little over a year ago, I had to quit jogging and playing basketball due to knee problems (arthritis, it appears). I started swimming twice a week, and while that has been good exercise, it's just not as much fun as the basketball. During the summer, I ran across a company that sells orthopedic tights. That's right, orthopedic tights. I shelled out some big bucks in hopes that they would help with my knees doing yard work, but I am now glad to report that I am back to playing hoops again, once a week, wearing the tights. They redistribute the stress to the muscles above and below the knee, and help align your knees better for less pain. I still can't go out and run 3 miles like I used to, nor do I intend to try, but I can go play basketball in the mornings for about an hour, and not have any increased knee pain. As I like to refer to them, they are Batman's orthopedic retirement tights. It's nice to be super again. (Cross posted to the Lyons family blog)

Facebook

Personally, this old-fashioned blog page makes more sense to me than does Facebook, but it looks like we've all abandoned it.

Tanto Tiempo

Hey everybody. I have to admit it's been quite a while since I've been on the blog, I need to be better about that.

AJ and I have some big news. My company offered me a job in the Philippines starting this summer so we will be heading overseas. We'll be there for a year to begin with and we may stay longer. We'll see how things go for now. Needless to say we are super excited. We've known for a while but it only became official on Friday so we decided we can start telling everyone. My company outsources several of our manual processes and I'll be overseeing production over there. It's kind of crazy how things have turned out. I think I was the 12th employee hired just a little over a year ago and now we're up to about 70 employees here in Woodinville and 300+ workers via our providers overseas. It's been really cool to work with such a rapidly growing company. I've learned so much and it's been such a blessing and a great opportunity. If any of you are planning on being in that part of the world in the next year, you'll have a place to stay.


This is a shot of our provider's office where our production staff works. So much nicer than our office here in Woodinville. I won't lie though, they don't get paid as much over there.


This is Eastwood City where our provider is located. It's really nice and has pretty much any kind of food you could ever imagine.

Baby Zoey

Here's a few pictures of Pete and Becca's daughter Zoey, who came last night! She weighed 7 lbs 13 oz and was 20 1/2 inches long. She really is amazing cute for a newborn! We'll get more pictures up soon...I'm sure she'll be well photographed.

Congratulations Pete & Becca, welcome to parenthood! :)

A Sneak Peek to some of the videos of A Brand New Year

Below is a widget where you can watch some of the videos of A Brand New Year.
Nick appears in the segment entitled "Steadfast and Immovable"
Enjoy.

Merry Christmas to all!

Hope you all enjoy lots of time together! We spent last weekend playing in the snow in Leavenworth, which was very cold, but so much fun. Merry Christmas everyone!

Love, Carrie

Goodbye to Rex

We need to mention, out of respect, the passing of our great friend Rex, our golden retriever / husky mix, on Dec. 13. He would have been 15 years old in about April. A sad few days for us since. The picture is from Christmas 2007.

Cousins

Matt and Lorie came to Seattle this week for a Killers and Death Cab for Cuties concert, and so we got the chance to tend their four youngest one night this week. We invited Carrie and Emma over for a chance to get the cousins together, and got this picture of Emma, Joelle, Ashton, and Sage (I think I got the spelling right). Riley was downstairs playing video games with Zach, and these kids were watching Disney's updated Winnie the Pooh series, which I find a big disappointment over the old Pooh stuff with the voice of Stirling Holloway. But then, they don't seem to mind, so you can tell they were having a great time.

It was fun to get to see them, and have Emma get a chance to see her Montana cousins. We hope they come back soon!