Stanley Muller slide scanning project done

I have now scanned over 7000 of my dad's (Stanley Muller) slides from roughly 372 rolls of film. I believe I am done scanning his slides. When I started this project, I didn't know how many there were, but I guessed around 4000.

Along the way, I've had fun discovering lots of stuff I remember from my childhood, as well as a large number of slides, both old and "recent" that I had never seen before at all.

Probably the most pleasant surprise of my entire scanning experience: I found a set of slides that I had given up for lost. The subject was a 1959 automobile ferryboat trip from San Francisco to Oakland and back. I remember this trip, when I was 4, and I remember seeing slides from this trip when I was a very young child in the early 60s during slide shows that my dad would put on periodically.

Other jewels I have uncovered in recent days: A set of pictures from a trip my family made to Fairyland in Oakland in 1958. I was 3. I have pictures of me meeting Skipper Sedley and King Fuddle. Skipper Sedley had a TV show on KRON channel 4 in the Bay Area that I used to watch.

I am going to be scanning around 100 or so slides of the work portfolio of my dad's long-time employer, Cornelius Sampson. He inherited these slides when Sampson died. He didn't know what to do them, other than preserve them, and both he and Sampson's wife couldn't bear to throw them away.

What's here and what's coming

The framework and part of the repository for my genealogy research is the GEDCOM database maintained on Rootsweb.

Living people have been removed to protect privacy.

In addition to the GEDCOM data, there is a relatively small amount of textual information, including evidence from various censuses to support the basic facts, a few obituaries and wedding announcements.

Not included in the database, and generally not anywhere on the Internet at the moment are:

Biographical sketches

I've written one of Marcus M. Thompson, and posted it here. I have a dozen or so others in mind. These are meant to provide a minimal narrative of the basic facts of a person's life, to suggest research opportunities and provide an overview, and in Thompson's case, to attempt to correct somewhat misleading family stories.

Letters

I have a few letters. A transcription of one is posted here. Others are images only. My goal is to eventually post images and transcriptions of all of them.

Audio

My dad conducted audio interviews with several people. Eventually, both audio files and transcripts will be posted. Also, my grandfather recorded several events on wax 78s in the 1930s. There are also some other audio files, made by others.

Video

My grandfather also made some home movies -- in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. This is currently all on 16mm film. (He had some of it converted from early 9mm to 16mm!)

Photographs

My dad (Stanley Muller) took thousands of photographs (primarily 35mm b/w and color film) over 75 years, in all environments of lots of people and landscapes. He's upgraded to digital now, with my support. I have scanned most of them, but have a few more thousand to go. One of my goals is to organize them and put them on the Internet somewhere.

Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement payments

As I was doing my California state taxes last night, I ran across an unbelievable question:

"Did you receive any income from Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement payments?"

I was so tickled that I went and told my dad.

This actually is slightly relevant to our family, because my father's father's father, Georg Mueller (an ethnic German living in a German village in Georgia on the Black Sea), was inducted into the Russian Army in 1877-78 to fight ... none other than the Ottoman Empire (aka the Turkish Empire; aka 'The Sublime Ottoman State').

I playfully speculated that our family was deserving of such payments because the actions of the Ottoman Empire forced Russia to abandon its century-long agreement to let the German settlers in its territories retain their religion, culture and language, and not induct them into the army. This stressed out my great-grandfather and made him a little crazy, which in turn made my grandfather a little crazy, and my dad suffered from his craziness, and I suffered in the telling and retelling of it.

So, I probably deserve some kind of settlement.

To find out where to sign up for an Ottoman Empire settlement payment, I did some research.

It turns out that in 2005 a life insurance company was forced to pay some settlements from actions of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, in which they committed genocide against Armenians, Kurds and others. Last year (I suppose), the CA legislature voted to make such settlements exempt from taxes.

I guess I don't get a Ottoman Empire settlement payment.