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.

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.