Whose Hoof Print Is This?

I found some tracks in our back yard. Each footprint is around four inches long, but to me it doesn't look quite like a deer track. Could it be livestock from a neighbor's farm again?

Linking to: Black and White Wednesday

Flash Portraits

Here's Flash posing for some holiday portraits. I took him to the vet's office today to get his nails trimmed and had him pose in front of their faux-fireplace. They've been taking pictures of the pets who come in and putting them on the bulletin board and their Facebook page.

Getting Benny Ready for the Holidays

I wanted to get Ben groomed before Christmas so that he would smell and look nice. The first shot is is his "before" picture.

I've known for a long time that he was difficult to groom. When he was a puppy, I took him to a pet store for his first grooming session. He not only bit the groomer, he bit her assistant and then he bit me!

Janet muzzles him. Here we see him struggling against a nail trim.  And below we see his "after" picture.

Valance for the Non-Seamstress

I made valances for our family room. It has five windows, one of them double, and I didn't want to spend a lot of money. However, my sewing ability is limited, not because I can't sew a straight line but because I seem to mess up every sewing machine I try to use! And I have no talent for things like bobbins and tension adjustments.

I'm not big on craft projects either, but this one didn't take long once I got ample supplies. The material was already hemmed although it was too wide so I trimmed one end and turned it in, creased it with a hot iron, and then pressed the end down with iron-on hem tape. Then I hung it using café hooks.

Perhaps you have already guessed what the material was originally. You may have even seen the original item at Big Lots!

Yep, it was a table runner. It was 72" wide (long?) until I shortened it to the width of the window plus about 7 inches.

Little Linda

This is a very old picture of me. I believe my dad took it, using flood lights that he got for filming home movies.  I remember those lights from later sessions, not this one.

My mom used to say I looked like President Eisenhower when I was a baby! That was because I had more forehead than I had hair.

Blog Post #4150

Here are a few odds and ends. The first is the most important:

• Have you changed your passwords lately? Two million Facebook, Gmail, Google+ and Twitter passwords were stolen last month! So do change those passwords, plus any that are associated with your financial accounts. 
• The Smitten Image linked my Shadow on a Wall photo as a Post of the Week. Thanks, Hilary!
• Ebay sent me a certificate for having a positive feedback score of 500. I haven't sold anything there in a while, so I guess that shows that I'm a frequent buyer! 

I do shop online frequently, particularly on ebay and Amazon.

Geese on Ice

It's been so cold that the lakes in our neighborhood are pretty much frozen over. The geese don't seem to mind.

The Birds Are Back

I put out suet blocks when I saw the forecast for snow. The birds seem to appreciate it.

I took these pictures from the comfort of our living room. It's been really cold here!

Holiday Strasburg

Town Tree, Strasburg, Virginia

Streetlight Decor

Linking to Skywatch Friday

Taxi Stand Murals

LW Photographed by FW

These paintings are on a small building owned by the town of Strasburg, VA. Over the years this building has been a store, a studio, and (you guessed it!) a taxi stand.

The paintings were done by Shenandoah Valley artists Dan Voss and Anthony Coviello.

Linking to Orange You Glad ...

Aunt Clarice's Baby Picture

This is an old portrait of my father's sister Clarice. It's from around 1912 and it's in a paper mat. The photo is in great shape for being a century old! But that's a benefit of black and white prints, they last beautifully. In this age of digital photography, we often neglect to collect long-lasting pictures. How precious they can become as the years go by!

I scanned this using my husband's PC and all-in-one printer. His PC does not have a good imaging program because the ones we tried seemed to interfere with our internet set-up so he wound up running System Restore, thereby wiping out the new program. I scanned this using MS Word and a sequence of keys that's not used much anymore: Holding down the ALT key, press I, P, and then S. [That stands for Insert Picture, Scan.] Select the device (assuming the item to scan is already on the screen) and scan at print quality. When the image appears in Word, I go to File/ Save As and select PDF. Then I email the PDF to myself so I can open it on my Mac and crop in Photoshop and save as a JPEG.

I know that sounds complicated but once you do it a few times, it's easy.

Linking to: Black and White Wednesday

Carol's Birthday

December 11 is my older sister's birthday. Unfortunately we lost her at a young age.

By the time I reached my teens, she was already ill so most of my memories of her go back to a time long ago. She was only a year older than I was. One of my earliest memories is riding together in the back seat of the old Chevy on the way to Michigan to visit my grandmother. My mother had dressed us in matching sundresses, frilly pinafores with a carousel print, very cute. Colorful merry-go-round horses circled around us! And we played and giggled, actually getting along better than we typically did. Like many siblings, we were competitive.

It's odd how some memories are clear when so many are hazy or totally lost. Some years I almost forget that her birthday is coming, but I feel a heavy sadness and then remember why. She died in a mental hospital as an adult after spending many years in the state hospital system struggling with a schizophrenic condition that robbed her of the ability to make rational decisions. The last time I saw her she did not know me.

When we were children, some people could not tell who was who and called us by each other's names.  We had similar smiles but her face was broader so I can tell us apart in the pictures.

Compare our pictures in 1952 and 1957.

More Snow

It snowed last night and continued this morning. In the afternoon, the clouds parted and let the sun warm the roads.

Red Phone Booth

I finished a digital imaging class last week. One of our assignments was to create a fantasy photo.

I used an image I took of a phone booth at a Kentucky gas station and added a donkey I saw in Amissville, Virginia. Then I selected a few animals and a plane from other snapshots and pasted them in. There was some touching up to do but overall it was fun.

We Got Snow!

View from Our Living Room

The first real snow of the winter came down yesterday. Despite a forecast for only a couple of inches, we got about five inches plus a coating of ice.  Warm temperatures this afternoon melted it off the roads so I can't complain.

Shadow on a Wall

Linking to: Orange You Glad…

("Life's Sweets and Spices")

More Scenes In the Brethren Cemetery

Beaver Creek, Maryland

Here we see the marker for John Witmer (Sr.), father of Elizabeth (Eliza) Witmer who married John Hammer. Elizabeth and John moved from Maryland to Illinois. One of their sons was D. H. Hammer, Senior, whose son was my grandfather.

John Witmer lived from December 1773 to August 1858. He died at age 84, which seems oddly common in my family.

In the second photo, Witmer's grave is on the far right. According to notes I inherited from my grandfather, John Witmer served in the War of 1812.

The final tombstone in this series is of John Funk, who was not one of my ancestors, although he married a Newcomer so I suppose he was a distant relative.  He is said to have built the large mill on Beaver Creek between 1811 and 1821 to replace a wood gristmill that had collapsed. Later he sold it to the Doub brothers, after whom the mill is currently named.

Funk lived to be 89. I've noticed before that old tombstones show that plenty of people lived to a ripe old age.

I began this series of cemetery pictures with a photo of the fine Victorian entrance gate to the cemetery, so I'll conclude with the same gate as seen when we left. The sun was low in the sky and temperatures were dropping so I didn't even find markers for all of my ancestors who are said to be buried there. Perhaps another day...

Heinrich Neukomer

Beaver Creek Cemetery, Maryland

We found the grave of my ancestor Henry Newcomer marked with his birth name Heinrich Neukomer. During his lifetime the name was Anglicized, at least in written records at the time of the American Revolution. Sometimes the name is spelled Nuekommets or Neukommet. He lived 50 years, from December 1744 to May 1795.

I did not locate the grave of his wife Barbara Garber Newcomer, although it may well be the one next to his. The years since her death in 1818 have obscured the engraving on that marker. She was 71. Sometimes her maiden name is spelled Garver or Gerber.

Earlier Posts:

• Henry Newcomer, Tory
• Historic Beaver Creek

Link: Newcomer-Genealogy.com

Christian Newcomer, Circuit Rider

A marker in the Beaver Creek Cemetery commemorates Bishop Christian Newcomer, who lived from 1749 to 1830. He was a brother of my gggg-grandfather Henry Newcomer, born in 1744. Sons of Wolfgang Newcomer and Elizabeth Maudelin Weber, the brothers were born in Pennsylvania and moved to Maryland.

Brother Christian was the third Bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.

Christian kept a journal and in his later years he edited it for publication with the assistance of Rev. John Hildt. It's called The Life and Journal of the Rev'd Christian Newcomer, Late Bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and can be found online in several formats. (See the PDF here — it's full of names and places in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.)

Let's take a closer look at the plaque.

"Christian Newcomer, Pioneer Minister, Compiler of a biographical journal, and Bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, traveled over the Allegheny Mountains 48 times by horseback organizing and administering the work of the Church.

Presented by Pennsylvania Conference, Evangelical United Brethren Church.
1955"

Link: A Bishop Who Organized His United Brethren 1749-1830

Entering Beaver Creek Cemetery

Beaver Creek, Maryland

The cemetery gate faces Beaver Creek Road next to the Brethren Church.

I took the second picture inside the cemetery. The gate would be near the right side of the picture. The warm colors of sunshine belie the fact that temperatures were falling and a cold wind was blowing.

I imagine the Witmer marker is for a distant cousin of mine because my great great grandmother Eliza Witmer was from Beaver Creek. She married John Hammer and they moved to Illinois in 1838.

Link: Skywatch Friday