I've had to turn off the registration feature for the time being due to the persistence of a spammer or spambot that repeatedly registers as users in an attempt to post spam on the site. Rather that delete a couple dozen fake users every day, I've turned off registration until I have a chance to research more security plug-ins.

If you'd like to register, please send me a message using the contact link at right and I'll create your account manually. Most everything on the site is accessible to everyone, but registered users can create forum topics and post comments in the forums.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Tom

We've made some progress in uploading data and images to the catacombs, but much of last weekend was spent battling spambots — those evil automated Web robots that try to post spam in forums and comment areas, and that suck up e-mail addresses for nefarious purposes. I've been installing various security plugins, such as CAPTCHA, but spambots are still managing to register as fake users.

I have tried to be careful when deleting the hundreds of phony spambot user registrations, but I may have accidentally deleted a legitimate user or two. If your account was deleted, please accept my apology and please register again.

CAPTCHA, which requires you to prove you are a human being by typing in characters, seems to have stopped the spam posts in the forums. But it also makes it harder for legitimate users to create forum topics, and I'm sorry for that. I'm still looking for the best and least onerous security solution.

Regarding the genealogy data, we discovered that the birthdates are missing from many of the 6,000-plus individuals in the catacombs (database). If I have time next weekend, I'll upload an updated GEDCOM file in hopes of correcting that.

Meanwhile, thanks for your patience.

Tom

Genealogy is such an adventure! And you never know where it will take you.  My paternal grandfather, Vincenzo DiMascio, came to the United States in 1904 from Pescina, a small village in L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy.  The story is that Vincenzo's father became widowed, remarried, and Vincenzo and his brother (who remains nameless to this day) left home - Vincenzo coming to the United States and his brother going to South America. There is virtually no information on his family. From time to time I would ask my father if any of his father's other family members ever came to the U.S. and he'd say no.

Then I found my grandfather and family in the 1930 census on Ancestry.com. A closer look showed a Joe and Anna DiMascio and family just down the road. People I'd never heard of. Too close to be a coincidence, I thought, so I said to my father on the phone next chance I got: "So, Dad, when you were living on the farm in Clarendon, Orleans County, New York, who were those DiMascio's who lived down the street? You know, Joe and Anna and ...?

"Oh", he says, "that was my father's cousin, Joe."  Hmmm ... if I could find out about them, perhaps they might have a bit more information. But, how do you approach people you've never met, and how do you find them?  Thank goodness for Google and the Internet. I searched for each child listed and came up discouraged — until I found Frank and Barbara, son and daughter-in-law of Joe and Anna, in California.

I sent a letter (explaining that I'm not a nut case, providing information about my family) and got an excited phone call in return. One thing led to another and I have family — Linda, daughter of Frank and Barbara — and we are sharing photos and information. (See her christening photo at left).

Then I saw a family tree on Ancestry.com — DeMascio — and met Dave, who is an even closer relative to Linda (and somewhere along the line the spelling of the last name changed!), and now Linda and I have another cousin! But wait, there's more! Dave's grandmother, Helen, is holding Linda in the photo!

My maternal fourth great grandmother is Delight Church (1783-1864), daughter of Samuel Church and Hannah "Polly" Rogers, and wife of John Rossiter Smith. Delight's next older sister was Dierdama Church, who married Daniel Smith (I suspect that Daniel and John Rossiter Smith are related, if not brothers — but that's another adventure). Daniel and Dierdama had a daughter, Phoebe, who married Isaac Dodge Bailey — and one of their descendents, Doug Bailey, answered a surname post I posted quite a while ago. He sent me wonderful photos of Dierdama and Phoebe — and now I have an idea of what Delight might have looked like. And I have a new cousin! It's just so darned exciting!

— Kathy Tuell

Tuell.Net is now up and running, for the most part, on faster servers at a new hosting company (bluehost.com). We've got the GEDCOM information reloaded in the Catacombs area, but a lot of the detail (such as the Google Maps data) must still be reentered. We hope to have a new photo gallery (about 1,600 family photos) installed by the end of the weekend.

Kathy recently has connected with relatives in California and New York (surname DiMascio), and she is adding new data. We now have more than 6,700 relatives and ancestors in our genealogy database.

I'm still chasing down bugs with the new installation, so don't hesitate to e-mail if you encounter problems.

Tom Tuell

If you were just redirected here from a temporary page, don't worry. We're moving the site and we haven't permanently shifted the Web address yet. (Don't bookmark this page because the URL is temporary.)

This is the third incarnation of Tuell.net in the past couple of months. This time, the site is hosted by a different company that has servers optimized for Drupal, the content management sofware that runs Tuell.Net. I'm hoping that fact will mean an end to the problems I've been experiencing.

And, since I'm having to build it again from scratch, it will only gradually assume the functionality it had previously. By the end of the day (Sunday, Oct. 18), I hope to have it fairly functional and a link posted from the old site — I won't change the actual Web address until I have all the e-mail accounts moved to the new host.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Kathy and I have spent the past two weeks in Duncan, Okla., with my parents, Henry and Eunice Tuell. Both are 92, and in relatively good health.  I again conducted videotaped interviews with them, asking them to tell me everything they can remember about a long list of relatives, and about growing up in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s.

I learned a few things from my previous videotaping that helped me improve this week's interviews. First, the built-in microphones on consumer video cameras do not produce high quality audio, and they pick up ambient sound in the room -- such as air conditioners, ticking clocks, etc. I purchased a relatively inexpensive RODE shotgun mic that does a much better job of picking up the voices of  interview subjects without the audio clutter.

Second, my earlier interviews shot indoors were a little dark. I purchased a shoe-mounted camera light that runs either on battery or AC power. It was better, but not great. Then I adjusted the gain on the camera and that brightened the entire scene, including the background. It produced much better video. Unfortunately, it will be a challenge to mix clips from the previous interview with the new video. I may be able to improve the older clips with the editing software (Avid Media Composer) by adjusting gamma, brightness and saturation.

Another challenge I'm facing is the size of video files. After a about an hour and a half of interviewing, I had 74 GB of raw HD video (in JVC''s proprietary condensed format). I thought I'd get a jump on converting it to Quicktime for editing, but that was a mistake -- the conversion tied up my laptop for about 24 hours, and I had to plug in a portable drive after running out of disc space. I'm reasonably sure I'll be investing in a couple of 1.5 TB drives for my editing station before my family genealogy documentary is ready to burn to DVDs.

On a related note, I'd hoped to shoot more B-roll for that project while here on the Lower Plains, but we so enjoyed being with family that it slipped down on our list of priorities. Now we're out of time  and reluctantly catching a plane home to South Florida this afternoon.

Tom

I had no intent of spending the entire weekend reworking the site, but once I waded in it was too late to back out. I created a new theme and better integrated the photo galleries into the site using a WordPress plugin, WPG2. The menu tabs also are now consistent throughout the site.

However, the Cooliris slideshow function is harder to find — it's a slideshow link on the side rather than the customary icon on the photo — so that will take some more tweaking later. The hardest part was trying to edit HTML pages using Microsoft's Web editor, "Expression Web," which is the worst wysiwyg editor to come along since FrontPage. Buying it was a gamble, and I wasted my money.

Despite the frustration, I think it turned out pretty well. And I can always renovate the guest bathroom next weekend.

First, our apologies for neglecting tuell.net lately. Life is full of distractions from work, family, home projects and too many interests. Genealogy pretty much slipped to the back of my mind until our annual genealogy.com subscription came due — a significant financial reminder that I should be getting my money's worth from it.

However, I became distracted updating a home theater, eliminating lots of obsolete equipment. It was nice to get all those bulky black boxes off the shelf, but the downside of eliminating a 200-disk CD changer is ripping a couple hundred CDs (plus 50 or so more that weren't in the changer) onto a hard drive.

Also, during a reinstall on my laptop, I inadvertently deleted my backed-up database of movies. That meant reentering the info on about 250 DVDs.

We're gradually posting photos — which also means organizing them. We've got photos scattered across two laptops, a home server and a network drive, and we're trying to get everything synchronized and organized into a consistent system. Good luck with that.

We cleaned up the photo gallery a bit this weekend and better organized some of the family groups. But for the most part, I've been distracted lately learning new video editing software. I made a big jump from the simple $100 off-the-shelf software to Avid Media Composer, a professional editing application that may take me years to master. Of course, I've rationalized the upgrade by convincing myself it's needed for a family genealogy documentary. My Christmas DVD project was a little hinky — jerky pans and zooms, etc. — so I convinced myself that the off-the-shelf stuff wouldn't do.

Of course, it required a new workstation, too, but that's another story.

Tom Tuell

Kathy and I visited my parents (Henry and Eunice Tuell) in Oklahoma in August. I purchased a high definition video camera to do some genealogy interviews with Mom and Dad, as well as to shoot B-roll video of prairie and family cemeteries for my ongoing project -- a personal documentary of my ancestors who settled in the Chickasaw Nation in Indian Territory.

My parent's home serves as the family depository for old photos and family artifacts, and I've spent more than one vacation with a scanner and boxes of old photos. However, this trip I was surprised to find a previously undiscovered cache of old photos, ranging from tin-types of my great grandfather to school photos of my parents. There also were boxes of crumbling newspapers and clippings that were evolving into dust. I found more than 500 photos in all, so I quickly borrowed a scanner from my sister and went to work.

We also purchased a half dozen or so photo boxes of various sizes, reams of acid-free paper, a portfolio for the newspapers and Kathy set about archiving everything to slow deterioration as I scanned.

It will take months to finish embedding caption information in the photo files (I spent hours getting Dad to identify people), but I'm trying to post them in our gallery as I find time. I've already posted lots of photos from the Frost-White branch.

I'm working on about 200 photos of Mazie Frost and Henry Offord Tuell (my paternal grandparents). They purchased cameras when they were courting and obviously had great fun documenting their courtship and brief marriage -- he died in the 1918 flu epidemic after they'd been married only two years.

I'll try to get those posted soon, but I'm also renovating two bathrooms ... I'm sure you know how that goes.

Tom Tuell

I spent this weekend writing photo captions and uploading hundreds more photos, mostly in the Frost and Tuell branches. Adobe Bridge allows me to write metadata, including captions, for multiple photos simultaneously, which is really handy when dealing with several hundred images. MS Pro Photo Tools, a free utility you can find on Microsoft's download site, does the same but not as easily as with the Adobe product.

The Gallery 2 content management application is agonizingly slow, especially with the large number of images I've posted. I like the PicLens compatibility, but I don't know how many people use that browser add-on. I still think a flash gallery might be better — certainly faster — but it would take some time to put one together with all the nested family branches and other photo subgalleries.

On Saturday, I located lots of period music for the genealogy documentary I'm working on. One great site for public domain and open source audio is http://www.archive.org. There is a phenomenal collection of old 78 and cylinder recordings dating from late 1800s through the 1920s. The site also has archived video and books. It's really worth checking out. The Library of Congress is another great source for both audio and images.

I'm also thinking of putting together some sort of family photo DVD for Christmas, using some of the period music I found. That's probably next weekend's project.

Tom