Links to the Past

The Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin)

1932 May 7

Body Missing From Milwaukee Cemetery

Milwaukee (AP) Police aid was asked today in an effort to find the body of George Kurtz, pioneer Milwaukeean buried 24 years ago in Union cemetery. Relatives who visited the grave site found evidence of a recent burial. At their insistence the body of a woman was taken from the grave and buried elsewhere but there was no indication of what had become of Kurtz’ body.

I recently received this inquiry.  If anyone out there knows relatives of this family or can offer assistance in anyway, please contact me or the Connie. They have been looking for the family since 2001 so any help would be appreciated. Thank you for looking.

I am searching for the family of Sgt Walter R. Battenberg who was KIA in WWII on 3/24/45.  He was from Milwaukee WI.  I found his name on your web site.  My uncle was the pilot of the B-24 that was shot down.  All were killed in action.  We have a wealth of information that we would like to share with his family. The crash site has been located and 2 memorials have been put in place in Germany. So far we have been unable to locate the family.
We would appreciate it if you could hopefully give us a direction for our search.
Sincerely,
Connie

For years, USGenWeb was graciously given free server space for their completely free state and county sites by an organization called Rootsweb.  A number of years ago, Rootsweb was purchased by the same company that owns Ancestry.com.  Recently this company made some changes in the way their URL render.  The new URL for these pages is rootsweb.ancestry.com

Since perception is everything, a number of the volunteers of the USGenweb sites were uncomfortable with the fact that the ancestry.com name is now part of their URL.  As such, the volunteers began moving their sites to different servers and new URLs.  Since ancestry.com does not allow proper redirection of websites using conventional methods, the search engines are now experiencing thousands of bad links relating to the genealogy world.

I am in the process of writing to all the major search engines, explaining the situation, asking them to index these new pages more often and faster….in hopes to get the genealogy community back into the major search engines.

Sorry for any problems any of you are experiencing.  If it relates to a Wisconsin Page, please let me know and I will see if I can find out where the pages went.

I have tried a few friends, the Milwaukee list and now here.

Perhaps someone just purchased a photograph of a movie star when she was performing here in Milwaukee. Perhaps she was born here in Milwaukee and went out to Hollywood to find her fame and fortune. Either way, this beautiful lady intrigues me.

Does anyone recognize this mystery woman? She looks familiar to me but I can’t place her. My friend picked up her photo at Goodwill a few days ago and now we are trying to identify her.

A larger version can be found in my gallery.

This is what my friend has to say about her:

“All I know is that the photo has “Seawell” embossed on it and the mat says “Paul Hesse Studios.” I learned at http://www.mptv.net that they were Hollywood photographers and took photos of many famous people.”

“The photo was framed with cardboard on the back. I can make out WATER ST and MILWAUKEE 2 WIS.”

I did a little more research and the word Seawell refers to Wallace Seawell (1916-2007), a celebrity photographer. His career started in the 1940s and lasted more than 60 years.

His obituary, which can be found here http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20070602/NEWS/706020383, goes on to say that he took photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Lucille Ball, and Peggy Lee. He was a close friend to George Burns, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Johnny Mathis and Robert Cummings. He took photographs for Hollywood celebrity magazines such as Photoplay and Screen Gems.

So….does anyone have any clues?

We have a volunteer to type up the pages of the Shipmaster list.  Thank you M&E Treptow for volunteering.

I have other things to type up.  If anyone wants to help out, please send me an email and I will see what we can find that interests you.

I have found that some of the pages that I have work real well with OCR scanners.  If you  have an OCR scanner and would like to do a page or two, please let me know.

WIRoots.org is undergoing a redo. That is my site I have for Wisconsin Genealogy. I will be further partnering with the WisNetwork.com and enhancing the resources on each county page.

If you have any Wisconsin links such as family tree links, resources, Genealogical Societies, Historical Societies or Musuems…anything of historical value that might be helpful to genealogists, please let me know and I will tell you how you can get the link added to the WisRoots.org.

Calling all photos, calling all photos!

I am in the process of putting up a photo gallery for Waukesha County and Milwaukee County. I welcome any submissions from anyone out there that has photos they want to share.

I will be making an album for each of the Milwaukee and Waukesha County Cemeteries.

I have a general album for Milwaukee

I have a general album started for most of the townships in Waukesha county.

I have a lost memories album which is a place to share images or people you can’t identify.

If you have photos you would like to share, please email me and I will give you instructions.

The album is located at LinkingYourPast.com. There are over 3000 photos submitted to the gallery and soon to be more.

This is a repost from Eastman’s online Blog. I thought it would be helpful to those of you who are looking for missing soldiers.

Online Database of U.S. WW II Missing in Action and POWs

The Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) has created the first electronic listing of missing personnel from the Second World War. The records came from two historical sources: Rosters of Military Personnel Whose Remains Were Not Recovered, 1951-1954 and The World War II Rosters of the Dead (All Services). POWs and MIAs are listed as well as those buried at sea. Entries on this website were created by corroborating names and service numbers appearing in both sources.

Use of the database is simple: go to the site’s web page and then look for the first letter of the person’s last name. There you will find separate listing for Army, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps and Others. The Others listings appear to all be civilians, including Merchant Marine. Service personnel who were buried at sea are listed in a separate section of the same web site.

Again, this web site contains lists only for those persons whose bodies were not recovered and those who were buried at sea.

You can access the “Service Personnel Not Recovered Following World War II” database at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/WWII_MIA.

Here is an article I read about the LDS church and it’s efforts to digitize information. We can look forward to some nice additions to the online genealogy community.

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_5930673

My cousin and I are actively seeking males with the surname Jonas to participate in the Jonas DNA study. If you are interested in more details please email me or go to Familytreedna.com for more details.