dad would be 62 today. although it is easily searchable in my blog, i like to let pass the memory of his last few days and replace it instead with the day he was born, december 9th.  people have the most potential on the day they were born. i like this entry from wikipedia:

The term birth is used metaphorically to refer to a beginning, especially of a natural phenomenon, one that is impressive in its scope or complexity, or one that is viewed favorably.

thanks, branden, for digging up, scanning, and sending me this photo.

after 10 years of dating and 3 years of engagement, eillenil (my step-sister) and mark got married this month. the ceremony was at mission santa clara de asis, on the santa clara university campus. it was nice to see a formal tie between the sudarios and the dimalantas.

it was such a hot day then, i wished i was wearing a barong tagalog like the goomsmen. dealing with the heat and suit made lugging a pentax 67 not too bad.

this is my brother tom and his wife clare.

i travelled to indiana last week to reconnect with family, meet clare, and be there for their wedding.

tom and clare were married at the hamilton county courthouse on friday. after the ceremony, i took pictures of everybody on the lawn behind the courthouse. we found a nice shady spot and were able to take some pictures before everybody got too sweaty.

i have a good amount of film to go through, mostly portra 160vc and 400, but also some of the new kodak ektar 100.

this was shot on portra 160vc. camera is the pentax 6×7, 80/2.8. negative scan, dust clone-out, auto-curves, resize.

this is a picture of my parents from 1973.

i haven’t posted anything for a while and thought i would dig through the slides and find one to post. i think this is a great shot of them. the framing, their composure, and the colors. it made me think about the future, by the way they are looking off to the amazing distant horizon.

this weekend i met jared and his wife on saturday. we introduced ourselves to each other, and i went over the research i’ve done so far. he didn’t have much to add, but they both have some good corrections for my notes. i’ll be contacting his father to see what he knows. we had a laugh at the end when we realized that all of his schlachets are his height, and all of my schlachets are my height.

it reminds me of meeting a distant relative years and years ago. shane. she lived in kentucky with some of my grandfather’s relatives. i now have distant relatives of my own (daniel, david, anita, elan, jared, josh, joel, ….) but you know, i have no solid connection with them aside from a last name. i am hopeful that we are all not-that-remotely linked. it will be nice to fill in the missing pieces about the family. questions like, who are these other schlachets, and why didn’t i know about them, or them about me?. i may solve these questions. genealogy, it turns out, is about obsessively investigating history.

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i’ve been working on expanding my family records using more web research. i’ve found another possible branch of the family, surname szlachet. there is also a schlecht family, who owns a poultry processing company in poland.

anyways.. i’ve been using a package called phpmyfamily to enter in family tree information. i used an open source graphing package named graphviz to draw the above graph. a moderately complicated sql query to phpmyfamily’s database generates a list of parent->child relationships and an awk script reformats it into the metalanguage for graphviz. once i’ve done some updates to the database, it takes me just a few minutes to generate a new graph. i hope to automate this..

the graph is helping me visualize the tree without having to redraw it on paper. it’s also making more obvious the holes, missing parts, and possibly linkages. i hope to gather enough bits of information to connect the large parts together.

this is my stepdad jim.

this christmas i decided to shoot the remainder of a small box of portra 400nc i had in 4×5. i brought the crown graphic and my tripod. we shot them out on my mom’s new deck behind her house.

unfortunately, once i got there i realized the rangefinder was busted. the batteries had corroded and mucked up the mechanism inside. i was able to clean it out a bit, and without my loupe to verify focus i took the shots anyways.

i had the film developed at newlab. i turned the film in around 4:30 and they got it done (dev only) by 7pm closing. what great service!

it’s been a while since i used portra. i really like calm colors it produces. and of course, making the switch from black and white to color in 4×5 is amazing. these were all shot at +1 (iso 800) at around f/5.6 and 1/100. the images are crops. i found the images nicer cropped down from the original, since i am not very well practiced with the crown graphic. next time i will remember my loupe and just use the ground glass, since i was using a tripod!

this is my mom. i love having a hyperlinkable mother. :)

this is my parents’ french bulldog, corky.

doing large format color is definitely very enticing. but i have enough projects to work on as it is……

who are we?

this is an old photo from my father. on the back is written: Summer 1937 / Winnipeg Ca

i’m not sure who these people are. The man in the center looks like my grandpa harry, but he is too old to have been. harry would have been 17 years old that year. is he a relative of harry’s? my mom thinks they might be related to harry’s wife, esther, but she is not sure either.

in my ongoing research into the schlachet family, i now have four working family trees, none of which intersect. i think the problem will end up being the holocaust, accounting for missing links and gaps in the tree. i’m finding schlachets who arrived in the united states from austria, poland, and germany. with so many growing but separate trees, the search is getting difficult but very interesting.

i recently heard from two brothers, david and daniel, whose father is from berlin. they pointed me to an alexander shlahet. alec changed the family name to bring it closer to the original polish pronunciation. he has a son adam and a daughter larisa, both of whom i have messages sent out to today. i will keep trying to go upwards on all trees to find the missing links.

so far, the closest new contact i’ve made is a jeremy, my second cousin (his grandfather is my great uncle abe). there are also a lot of J names: jared, jason, jaye, jeremy, josh, joel. jerome.

researching one’s family like this is an unusual matter. on one hand, most of the people i’ve been in contact with share only a name with me. they’ve had their own lineage and lived separately. on the other hand, i feel we are related in a large extended family sort of way. most of the schlachets i’ve talked to are interesting in what i find out. some, like anita, share my enthusiasm and excitement in the research.

my kuya jude asked me this morning, what i thought this all brings to me.. to know who the rest of my family is.

i think family tree research helps heal the gaps families accumulate over time. families have arguments, disagreements, and falling outs. they split and branch out and, over time, the original animosity fades. the research reminds you that you are still family and that the common ancestry is still there, despite what has happened in the past.

and sometimes, you think you knew how you got here. i mean, you knew the extent of your family’s “story”.. at least as far back as you or your parents can remember. when you discover there is more detail than you knew existed, it all becomes exciting again.

something very interesting happened today. i got an email from an anita schlachet. she found me online, searching for our last name. through a few email exchanges, we were able to quickly link her immediate family tree to the jared schlachet that i discovered through searching.

with some help from my mom, i was able to fill in some of my own tree. i was inspired to contact another schlachet on facebook.com, a jeremy. he got back to me fairly quickly, and it turns out that he linked to family pretty closely — we are 2nd cousins! see the tree:

there’s a small branch in san diego. eli and his two sons, josh and joel. i recently found joel on facebook and he remembers that visit (he was 9 years old at the time).

hopefully joel will get back to me with information from his parents. his father and my father had some common history but i could not remember it. i’m sure he is loosely related to me.

the stories i know about my family are really started to gel now. for example: one schlachet owned the vienna meat company in chicago. another schlachet was their distributor in cleveland. that guy (my dad’s “uncle abe”) once sent us a huge package full of meats for christmas. incidentally, the vienna meat company supplied kosher deli meats to shapiro’s deli, which if i’m not mistaken, i’ve eaten at.

family history is pretty interesting. more so, than before. the three question marks on the far left of the first diagram.. those may be victims of the holocaust.

the ellis islands records organization has scanned logbooks containing 12 entries for schlachets entering the country around the turn of the 20th century. i’ll keep those in my notes, in case they connect to the trees somehow.

anita should get back to me tomorrow. i hope to connect these trees together.

happy birthday, dad. love you.

this is a kodachrome dated feb 1973.

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this is my first wider post on my blog.

this is my dad in the petrified forest. scanned from a kodachrome slide, shot and processed in 1973. it looks like the auto-color matching of photoshop did pretty well. once i get around to scanning the other 500 slides it won’t take too much effort to do the post-process on the images i want to post.

had i been there in the park, i would have stolen a piece of the trees too. :)

in the past year ..

• i went hiking with my college friend jeff and his wife
• i had ranier up for several weekends, though not for a while.
• i evaded getting mugged.
• i fixed a stuck shutter by myself
• finally made it to burning man. i thought about you a lot. ryan and i baked 400 cookies to bring with is. it was crazy!
• i perfected my steak marinade.
• got fed up at affy and left. working at a better company closer to home now.
• took a week long solitary vacation to barstow. it was awesome. i want to go back.
• my friend emery’s mother passed away. i feel more grown up now.
• took a class on studio lighting, bought a grown-up set of gear. i still use that novatron set you and i bought for tom.
• been talking with other schlachets. remember eli down in san diego? one of his kids goes to berkeley now.
• got about half way through those slides. i’m still learning from you.
• started an actual photo project. shooting vacuum tubes. i love it. been going to flea markets hunting for them. reminds me of the old ham radio festivals.

anyways,

today is bike to work day and i drove in.

lorna’s moving this anniversary to december like it should be. but tonight is family night. picking up ryan and heading down the house after work today.

see you there.

i get excited when i get in touch with other schlachets.

last week i joined facebook, a big social networking site. as i usually do, i did a search for “schlachet” and found a joel, in berkeley. i sent him a note asking if he’s from the large group of schlachets from ohio. no, he said. he’s from sandiego, but he’s met some of the ohio family.

i sent him a message back, briefly telling him about how i found an eli schlachet living in san diego and i arranged to meet him. my dad, brother, and i were on our way from los angeles to the san diego zoo. we did meet. eli was married and had two boys, just like my father (and my father’s father). my dad’s recollection of his family basically jived with that of eli. if i’m thinking correctly, both their fathers emigrated to the u.s. from israel about the same time.

so this joel, in berkeley, is the son of eli schlachet. one of the kids i met back in 1995 or 1996 in san diego.

is it weird that i feel some sort of draw to schlachet folk? i want to learn more about them. i want to be linked to them on websites.

when i was growing up, it was just my immediate family, my grandfather who moved from ohio to florida, my uncle in los angeles, and my dad’s half sister. his sister carolyn was from the zacuto family. a couple years ago i got in touch with a jeff zacuto, who’s met my uncle and aunt.

as i get older, i guess i’m learning more about family and understanding more why people are so interested in geneaology. it’s like history that means something very personally to you.

it makes me wonder, why there are a large group of schlachets in ohio who my family never kept in touch with. it seems like different parts of the family came into the u.s. at different times. my grandfather lived in ohio, did he know these other schlachets? i’m just guessing that eli is still around, i wonder if he remembers when we came to visit. i wish i knew/remembered more about my family.

jared schlachet, the photographer from los angeles, is from ohio. i need to make a trip down there, as we told each other we’d have to meet up if one of us was near the other.

jason, jared, joel.

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this is my brother tom. he was here just briefly for the holidays, heading back to ohio on christmas day.

i shot this with my burke&james 8×10. the lens was a carl meyer 12″ set to about f/11, 1/150. i applied a slight forward tilt. the film is kodak’s 320txp, exposed as ei400. i developed it in rodinal, 1:50, for 18 minutes.

otherwise.. i’ve been scanning more slides. i just passed the 500 slide mark tonight. i think the total may be closer to 1,000 now. so far the raw scans total 32 gigabytes. yowz!

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going through these slides is really like reliving my father’s life. i’ve been trying to go through as many slides as i could today. turns out the number is 172. that’s a lot of slides to scan, and at ~65mb each the storage adds up quick. i’m over the half way point in the first tray of slides. there are 2 more trays. i estimate the total to be in the neighborhood of 600-700 slides.

i am writing down notes on each slide so i can go back and quickly find what i am looking for. i’m also noting the slides’ location so i can rescan if necessary. i plan on scanning everything first, coming up with a rough annotation. then i’ll generate thumbnails and see how much my mom can identify. then i will start post-processing the “good” ones.

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this is my brother tom.

he was in town for only a few days and left on christmas day. still, it was nice to see him and hang out.. we took him to some of our favorite eatery places (rosamunde, frjtz, and bluebottlecoffee).

my brother took a photography class in highschool, and that is what sparked my interest in it.

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because we’re so much like our parents, it’s interesting to see how they were before you knew them. i have a ton of slides i have from my dad, and most of them seem to have some really good color in them still, even after 30-40 years. my parents’ wedding in arizona. my dad’s family trips in southern california. lots of annotated slides from viet nam.

i scanned a few last night and decided i should make more of a bulk scanning effort.

what will become of my negatives after i’m gone?

http://schlachetphoto.com.

no, that’s not me. that’s another j. schlachet. jared schlachet.

been thinking about my dad today. mainly because of emery’s posts about losing his monther recently. today i replied to a posting he made. it made me think about meeting emery’s mother. i met her a few times. in fact, most of my friends have met her.

very few of my friends have ever met my dad. a few of my college friends have. in fact, my dad put up two of them in his studio apartment while they found a place to live. my friend tim has i think. and of course ed, jon, and geno. and ryan. i guess the opportunity for others never came up.

for a long time i really put a hard divider between friends and family. mainly because i was living a double life of sorts, until i came out to my parents. even afterwards, i was just so used to keeping them separate. it’s hard to change how you behave after you’ve been following the same patterns for so long.

when my dad was sick and getting worse, i vowed to introduce my dad to one of my longest and closest friends, boman. they had both heard so much about each other from me. i’ve met several of boman’s family, including his mother who comes from pakistan, his siblings and his aunts. well, i tried. it just never worked out. and before long, my dad was gone.

i did bring boman down to meet my mom eventually. we were going down for a visit and on a spur of the moment decision, i invited boman along. it felt good. everybody liked each other. it’s so silly that i didn’t introduce him before. i don’t have anything to hide from anybody now. i love my friends and love my family. so why not? besides, my mom always entertains with embarassing stories from my childhood.

anyways, i hope i can be of help to emery.

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last night i held my father’s hand as he passed away. he (and all of us family) had been battling cancer for exactly eight months to the day.

i had just come back from vacation. in fact, i happened to be in the south bay when one of the kids called me to come to the house. earlier in the day he insisted on seeing the blue sky from the front door, even though he could barely stand up. by evening, i had joined the family and let him know i was there. by night, in his wife’s arms, with family all around, in their beautiful house, he quietly and peacefully passed away.

in exactly the way he wanted, at just the right time.