Vintage Photo Makeovers
Glimpse your Past Self with my Vintage Photo Makeovers! Larry Chiri, 2022/1886. Photo by Diana Thornton Send me your photos for a custom vintage transformation! Upload your high resolution photos Choose from my signature vintage styles Get your personalized edit Only $30 per image Add $15 for AI wardrobe change Custom styling, prints & framing available. Signature Styles Just Like You, every makeover is unique and takes on a life of its own, so results…
Research resources
Images Ebay for images of places - then follow that search and you'll receive an email when new items are added Pinterest 500 px Google image search - and you can use this to try to discover the source for a photo you already have - just drag the jpg and it will try to find that photo on other sites Youtube - search for history videos and real estate sale videos often includes images…
My ancestors helped found Santa Claus, Indiana
by Diana Thornton My 3rd great grandmother, Susan (Aegerter) Freyhofer, was born in Switzerland on Christmas Day, 1805. She died 57 years later in Santa Claus, Indiana, a town she and her husband Jacob helped found. Susan and Jacob Freyhofer and their two young children immigrated to the US in 1834. They landed in New Orleans and made their way up the Mississippi River to Indiana where they received a land grant of 160 acres…
The Court Martial of William Wagner
January 9, 1865 was a rainy Monday in Corporal William Wagner’s Union Army camp at Clarksville, Tennessee. He and his Company had been stationed there for a couple years. They were bored and impatient for the war to end so they could go home. Earlier in the day, William had quarreled with Charles Walster over a pistol. (Walster was a survivor of Company M transferred to Company H after a third of his Battery was…
Old Bill Wagner
Jacob William (later dubbed "Old Bill") was born in 1840 in Elleringhausen, Germany. At the age of 6, he and his family joined the waves of German immigrants after their friends in Quincy, Illinois, kept writing for them to come. Six-year-old William took his little sister Henrietta by the hand and led her up the gangplank onto the ship. She never forgot the smell of tar coming from the cordage coiled on deck. They had…
FBI File of Reverend William Weiler
"The first World war put my convictions to the test. When it broke out I was the pastor in Santa Claus, Ind. I had five children, the oldest ten and the youngest one. My salary was $800. We had nothing else to fall back on. My future was at stake. My pacifist position aroused suspicion, misrepresentation and opposition, especially after the became involved. If I were to go into detail I could tell you a…
Mystery Heirs of Frederick Herman Barth
How an old debt helped me put a big crack in a brick wall My third great grandfather Frederick Herman Barth was born in Hanover, Germany in 1816. I had very little information about his parents or anything about him before he moved to Canton, Missouri. There was also confusion about his wives, and the family stories didn’t provide much more than the fact that they came to Canton from Maryland after immigrating from Hanover.…
[Help Needed] Martin Ancestors in Preston and Taylor Counties WV and PA
I recently discovered a serious error in my tree. I had the wrong parents attached to Charles Wesley Martin. I and many others had connected George and Rebecca Martin as his parents based on records of their son Charles W. Martin born in a nearby county in the same year. When I noticed two different 1880 censuses attached to my Charles - one with his new wife Leah Knaggs and the other in Harrison Co.,…
Wagner Descendant’s Guide to Canton, Missouri
Canton, Missouri is where multiple generations and branches of our ancestors were born and lived and are buried. I’ve visited several times during my life, and it was the Homeplace for several generations. We have so many ancestors, cousins, aunts and uncles who lived here I cannot mention them all for this. DOWNLOAD PDF Here's a travel report from a recent trip my cousin Ben Wagner took to Canton. The Wagner house on Lewis Street…
Frederick Vesper
Frederick Vesper was my 3x great grandfather. He immigrated from Munden, Germany in 1846 at the age of 26, arriving at New Orleans. He settled in Canton, Missouri, where he farmed and lived the rest of his life.