A Comment about Facebook

Old news.

Well, it's been one year since anyone posted to this Blog, so I thought I'd break the slump. This is Ian and his fiance, CoyLou, then Iantha, Mary Anne, and Tanya at grand-daughter Anna's recent play, a version of Cinderella.

Comment Spam

I've noticed that we have comment spam on the last couple of posts. Can someone with admin rights remove them? It is just some Chinese junk about hotels and vacations or something like that...nobody I know. Maybe we need to enable moderation of comments to avoid it in the future. I know it's a pain to require someone to approve comments, but I am not sure what else can be done.

My Article has been accepted!

I just received word today that my article about the 1873 Arizona colonization mission and Frederick Augustus and Charlotte Senior King has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Mormon History, pending getting some revisions done. I'll be working on those over the next couple of weeks, and I'll let you all know when it is actually scheduled to be printed.

Folkman brothers and wives on Sunday evening

First time we were all together in four years. Had a good visit in Provo.

Pretty good looking wives, don't you think?

Folkman and Robertson Families on Jens' Blessing Sunday

The Robertsons are mostly on the left, and the Folkmans are mostly on the right. Jens is in the middle of the picture being held by Shala, in front of Adam.

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.