Looking back: New beginnings in Gore

I recently acquired these two very old photos. The first time I glanced at them I had no idea of where they were taken or who was in them. But the more I looked at them the more familiar they seemed to me until one day the penny dropped; they were taken in the town that I am so familiar with, the town that is a part of me and where I feel most at home. 

These photos were taken in the town of Gore, and this building is in fact the beginnings of the large department store called H & J Smith’s that still today stands proudly on the Main Street.

My eyesight is no longer the best so I scanned these photos at very high resolution to see if I could bring up some of the faces to see if there was anyone familiar amongst them. And when I brought them up on my computer screen, there looking back at me was my maternal great grandfather, James (Jim) Paul SCHULTZ.

James Paul SCHULTZ
(1887 - 1973)

Jim was born in East Gore in 1887 to Polish immigrant parents, and he was a painter and paperhanger in Gore his whole working life. These are the very first photos I had seen of Jim at work, in his white painting clothes. Looking at these two photos I can only but guess that all the men in white are painters and the others probably builders or labourers. The front windows of the shop appear to be covered in white paint so obviously the shop is still in the process of being built and is not yet open.

James (Jim) SCHULTZ looking from one of the
upstairs windows that overlook Irk Street in Gore.

At this point in time I do not have an exact date for these photos. I know that in the past few years there has been a book written on the history of the H & J Smith department stores in Southland so I may have to find a copy to see when the Gore store was built. At the same time as I acquired these two photos I also acquired another photo of Jim, who appears about the same age and also taken at work painting another brand new, not quite completed local building. This other building has the date 1909 proudly across the top of the door way so I can only assume that the H & J Smith buildings were completed around that time also.

Regardless of the exact date, these wonderful old photos are still probably 100 or more years old. And the fact that I can now see my great grandfather Jim, hard at work decorating this lovely old building that still stands magnificently today in our beautiful town, makes me very proud indeed.

Obviously extended over the years and now somewhat larger, the H & J Smith's
building on the corner of Main and Irk Streets in Gore.       (Photo taken in 2012)

A new year genealogy resolution

It’s been well over a month since I last posted on this blog, and despite the fact that I’ve been itching to get back to it, life in general just seems to keep getting in the way. But that’s quite okay, life’s for living and that’s what our time on this earth is all about. 

Summer on the farm: shifting sheep

Besides the very busy Christmas period that I’ve no doubt we all experience, life on the farm has also been so busy, busy, busy lately. Whenever I think that I’m about to get a free hour or two so I can head into the office to do a wee bit more research or scan a few more old photos, I get called upon to help shift cattle, or draft sheep, or weigh lambs, or something similar. In past years the kids have helped out on the farm and have done a lot of this work over the busy summer period. But as some of you reading this will already know, life for our family has changed recently with both of our kids finishing their high school careers and moving on to the next stage in their lives. They are both now working full time (one in a permanent job, and the other full-time at the moment raising funds to begin university next month), so that means they aren’t here to help out anymore, so more of it is falling back on me. And with that I find my time for my research, and my scrapbooking, and my writing, and all the other things that I love to do, have all taken a back seat. But that’s quite okay, I don’t mind helping my husband out with these jobs and I know that in a few months time when the busy summer period on the farm is over, and when my daughter is away at university, I will get some of my free time back.

Summer on the farm: making baleage

So with that in mind I thought that I would begin the new year by explaining how I am attempting to come at my research from a bit of a different direction this year and to hopefully do my bit to preserve my family history research for future generations. 

The number one thing on my genealogy “to do” list for this year is to continue with my project to get my family history research sorted and do something more meaningful with it. Creating this blog was the first big step in the process of making my research more accessible to other extended family members. I have been chasing ancestors and their descendants for almost thirty years now and all that I really have to show for it is boxes and boxes of old documents and photos (only partially sorted), and a huge, huge database of facts and figures in the family tree programme on my computer. Don’t get me wrong, there is an absolute wealth of information contained within these records, but unless you are someone who is very much “into” genealogy, browsing through someone else’s computer database just isn’t that interesting and it makes our family history very difficult to share with anyone. 

And if I were to drop dead tomorrow, I am sure there wouldn’t be anyone in my family that I can currently think of that would jump up and exclaim “she has all our family history on her computer; let me at it, I want it”. I would imagine one of my kids would probably claim my beloved computer, and it would then be used for gaming or ‘Facebook’ or such-like, and the family history contained on it would just sit there in the background until such time as they needed more room on the hard-drive, and then with the tap of just a few buttons it would be erased, just like that, and be gone forever.

My new shelves in my office. Still at least ten
more binders needed to complete my collection.

My aim for this year (and continuing right into the future) is to get more of the story of our family history actually written down to be shared. Last month I bought myself a new bookcase for my office and have started creating what I hope will become my family history legacy and my gift to future generations. I want to get back to basics and start recording more about the actual lives of those family members most closely related to me and my actual direct ancestors. My database currently contains thousands upon thousands upon thousands of names of those who can all be linked back to myself in one way or another throughout history. But many of these people are just so far removed from my main ancestral branches that I thought it was time to put a stop at present to just the collecting of more and more names and dates, and instead focus a bit closer to home on just the main ancestral branches and their families. (I will in time get back to these more removed branches as I do also like to follow branches right down to the present day if I can; but that’s another project for another year).

It took me many, many weeks of thinking about this before I decided exactly how I wanted to attack this project, but what I have come up with I am very happy about. It may not be the best system out there but it is one I feel very comfortable about and look forward immensely to getting on with it. I have begun to purchase 3-ring binders and hope to have one binder for each set of direct ancestral grandparents, right back as far as I can go. And within these binders I want to record everything I know or have found out about that particular couple’s life. The binders will also contain individual tabs for each of this main couple’s children, with another tab directly behind each child for that of the child’s descendants (their children and grandchildren). If the child is one of my direct ancestors that I descend from I will only have minimal data for them in their parents folder but will instead make a reference to them having their own folder.

I hope I aren’t confusing anyone and you are still following what I am attempting to do. To put it in slightly plainer terms, I want to only concentrate on those I directly descend from (and also include their children and grandchildren). And at this point in time I will go no further down any particular branch than that. There are many siblings of my direct ancestors that I have no knowledge of as yet, and it is the filling in of all these gaps that are “closer to home” that I want to concentrate on.

A work in progress; a close-up of some of my new binders

You might say I could have saved myself a lot of the money I have spent on binders etc and still do this using just my family tree programme on my computer. But as I explained above, that defeats the purpose of what I am attempting to do. I want to share what I have and what I find, and what better way is there to do it than to pull out a particular binder and let the person you are wanting to share it with actually see for themselves the photos, and read for themselves the stories that relate to their family too. There is nothing like holding a real actual book (or binder) and reading it for oneself to be able to better understand and feel more connected to those from whom we descend. And when the time comes that I breathe on this earth for the final time, I hope that these stories in these binders can then be more easily passed on and more easily shared with future generations. 

So many genealogists nowadays are trying to go all digital in the hope of simplifying their lives and their research. I myself will never do this as a physical book is so much more likely to be kept and cherished and passed on than a collection of digital files, that with the push of just one little button could all be gone FOREVER !!!