3 Ways to Give at Christmas

Christmas is supposed to be a time of giving and yet it often seems like a time of getting! More presents, more Christmas lights, more food.... it is easy to find ourselves caught up in greed and grab.

But I've found ways to convert that to more giving. If you're not already involved in these wonderful projects (or something similar) I urge you to try them out. It's a win-win situation when you help others and you feel good about it.

I have 10 grandchildren. As each of them reaches age 13, I take the money I normally spent on them for a gift under the tree, and use it for one of the following projects. Each grandchild knows what was purchased in their name and receives a card with information on the gift and how it helps others. The younger children still receive a present under the tree but I include them in the Sick Children's Hospital project.

Sick Children's Hospital has a very special meaning for me. When my first grandchild was one month old he became very ill and ended up in Sick Kid's. He was diagnosed with the flesh-eating bacteria. One lung was completely destroyed and the second partially gone and we were told he would not likely make it through the night. But specialists worked tirelessly to save him and although he was in ICU for many weeks and had many setbacks, they managed to control and eradicate the bacteria before the second lung was completely gone. Thanks to the doctors and staff at Sick Children's he survived (minus one lung) and is now an active 20 year old.

1. Plan Canada 
I support 3 girls on a monthly basis. Fiker lives in Ethiopia, Rojina is in Tibet, and Racheal is in Zambia. These sponsorships replace spending that money on gifts to my eldest grandchildren. My grandkids get to enjoy the letters and photos we receive from the girls, and they also get to be part of helping others who are not as fortunate as they are.

2. Sick Children's Hospital in Toronto Ontario
I love choosing what I think is the perfect gift to make in a grandchild's name. For example, Quinn likes to cook so last year I gave the Holiday Cooking and Baking Supplies gift in his name.

3. Kiva
By lending as little as $25 on Kiva, anyone can help a borrower start or grow a business, go to school, access clean energy or realize their potential. I'm part of the Genealogists for Families Team on Kiva. Currently I have made 10 loans to women in Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, El Salvador, Cambodia, Mali, Samoa, and the Philipines.

I try to make loans in my adult children's names based on their interests. For example I made one loan in my motorcycle loving son-in-law's name to a man in Kenya who need to purchase a new motorcycle for his taxi business.

Here are 3 of my 4 current loans:

Often I choose single woman with children who are involved in some aspect of food services - cooking, raising chickens, running a small grocery store. In fact I have some money in my account from a loan that was repaid a few days ago, and I'm going to choose someone new today.

The above are ways I spend money I would normally spend on gifts to family at Christmas. It may not suit everyone but I urge you to check out what is available where you live and consider a project helping others to better their lives.

Reconstructed New York Ships Passenger Lists 1624 to 1664

A few years ago I started reconstructing ships' passenger lists to New Netherland (present day New York) from various sources (see below for details)

In some cases, I've been able to reconstruct names for a ship list that has never been published before! In other cases, I've been able to add names to previously published lists. This is an Olive Tree Genealogy exclusive and is freely available at
ships' passenger lists to New Netherland

I reconstructed the names of those sailing on various ships from the following sources. Please note that not every source was used to reconstruct every ship. I have indicated which sources were used for each individual:

1. Abstracts from Notarial Documents in the Amsterdam Archives by Pim Nieuwenhuis published in New Netherland Connections in series Vol. 4:3,4; Vol. 5:1-3 (hereafter NNC)
2. Early Immigrants to New Netherland 1657-1664 from The Documentary History of New York (hereafter EINN)
3. Settlers of Rensselaerswyck 1630-1658 in Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts (hereafter VRB)
4. E. B. O'Callaghan's Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State, Albany NY (hereafter CHM)
5. New World Immigrants: List of Passengers 1654 to 1664 edited by Michael Tepper (hereafter NWI)
6. Emigrants to New Netherland by Rosalie Fellows Bailey, , NYGBR; vol 94 no 4 pp 193-200 (hereafter ENN)
7. De Scheepvaart en handel van de NederlandseRepubliek op Nieuw-Nederland 1609-1675 unpublished thesis by Jaap Jacobs [hereafter JJ][Olive Tree Genealogy database]
8. The records of New Amsterdam from 1653 to 1674 [hereafter RNA] [an online book from Ancestry.com]

The ships passenger lists begin in 1624 with a reconstructed list of names and end in 1664 with a total of 64 ships. 

How To Create a Photo Collage in Picasa

Step 1: Open Picasa and scroll to the folder that contains your scanned photos. Here's mine with some Hallowe'en pictures of my kids.

Step 2: Highlight (select) the photos you want in your collage. Don't pick too many or they will be rather small on your page. Click the little green button in your tray (bottom of the Picasa screen) to hold each photo you choose.
I've placed my cursor over that icon so you can see the little bubble "HOLD SELECTED ITEMS" that pops up.

You can also see the 5 photos I've chosen sitting in my tray. Click on COLLAGE (Orange icon at bottom)

Step 3: My collage was created. It is a Picture Pile (see top left under SETTINGS. It's a pile of scattered pictures but I have the ability to enlarge, move and tilt each photo.

I've selected one photo so you can see the little wheel that pops up on it. This wheel lets you drag on the hand to enlarge the photo, or rotate the wheel to tip it

Step 4: Under SETTINGS, I now chose MOSAIC. It automatically fits the chosen photos into the page. There are other choices too, you can have some fun playing with this. Your collage is not "set" until you click the CREATE COLLAGE button.

Step 5: Here I slid the GRID SPACING level along to the right to create nice big wide white spaces between those photos in the MOSAIC setting. This will allow me to add text once I create my collage

Step 5: Once I was happy with Step 4, I clicked on CREATE COLLAGE and this was the result. Now I can add text anywhere I wish on the collage. I can choose fonts, sizes and colours. There is more you can do, once again you can have fun playing. Your text isn't set until you click on APPLY.

Have fun and enjoy creating your Photo Collages!

Creating Family Photo & Document Books

My latest project is to create Family Photo & Document Books for my children. With that in mind, I've been trying out various programs to help me organize and display my photos and documents.

So far I've not had much luck and am not really happy with anything I've used.

I detest WORD for anything other than word processing (writing stories). Trying to insert dozens of scanned images, whether they are photographs or documents, is tedious and fraught with problems. Images jump. They overlap, they won't stay where I put them.

I do have a program I really like called PICTURE IT! But it's very old. It's limited in its capabilities and there are no upgrades. In fact it's been discontinued for many years. And it tends to crash. I can only create 25 pages at a time and I can only print one page at a time. If I create the max (50) and choose PRINT ALL, it's guaranteed to crash. It's also very tedious to insert photos. But I like how I can easily crop and shuffle photos or documents around and how fast it is to add text. If I could find something similar I'd be thrilled!

Next thing I tried was a PDF converter/creator called Professional PDF Converter 6. I paid $129.00 plus 13% tax for it. What a waste of money! The two things I must have is the ability to create headers and footers and add page numbers. Converter 6 is supposed to do this. The help file shows two nice little icons for just that. But my program does not have those 2 icons! A search of the website revealed that this is a flaw in every Converter 6 program and that it was reported and acknowledged in 2009. They still have not fixed it and there is no way to insert headers, footers or page numbers. I might as well have had a bonfire with my money.

Reluctantly I turned to Picasa 3. Don't get me wrong, I like Picasa (although I prefer the ealier versions). But for what I want, it's pretty useless. I was forced to choose the pics I wanted for a page, then create a collage, then add text. It looked good printed, but I have hundreds of photos and documents to add and I can only create one collage page at a time. I can't add pages and keep inserting scanned images. I've spent the morning creating nice collages but it's taking forever and I can't get consistent font sizes since it's all eye-balling it and adjusting the little text box to the size you want.

Even though I've chosen a specific font size, adjusting the text box makes the font bigger or smaller, depending on your adjustment. So it's not what I need either.

Any ideas for me? My wants are:

Consistent font sizes.
Headers
Footers
Page numbering
Ease of adding images and text (captions)

Am I asking too much?