Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Schultz Family Study - 18 November 2008

A break away from my Salt Lake City material as we pulled together a short note on my husband's Schultz Family. This had been a stunning breakthrough for him at Salt Lake City as he has hunted his elusive Schultz great grandparents for quite a while with an intensive study this last year. We attended the annual Schultz Reunion a year ago September and the family really pleaded with him to do their family tree knowing that he was so successful with so many of his other lines. A family chat session on what everyone could remember rekindled a memory of visits with an older lady who was fortunately on the census. Pulling all that information together with her wedding and finding her on the census prior to marriage with her parents. Working on those parents led us back to her mother's birthplace in Germany via death registration and obituary. At that point we were assuming a relationship between these two families without any concrete proof. Reviewing the parish register microfilm in Salt Lake City revealed that his great grandfather and the mother of the lady being visited by my husband were siblings. What an enormous breakthrough and the entire article will be in the OGS Ottawa Newsletter/Journal.

However before starting the actual writeup of the article we went off to get our Flu Shot at Ottawa City Hall - it is usually a fairly quick affair plus we wanted to attend the Press Conference looking at the cuts planned in Heritage Funding in the City of Ottawa. I listened carefully to all the thoughts and the redundant theme of all those participating was that there is a large monetary benefit to hotels and other services in Ottawa generated by heritage events (numbers such as 3 to 1 to 8 to 1). Although I am very much in favour of heritage events I do feel that they need to somehow generate funds and perhaps the best method would be a heritage tax levied on each and every household in the Regional Municipality of Ottawa (perhaps $25 per year) which would ensure a steady flow of support to these organization. Benefiting groups such as hotels/restaurants could give $100 per year each. The prime use of funding by the city should be to ensure that our infrastructure is maintained and other such necessary details. If extras are needed then it is best to go to the people and ask for funding.

I decided not to make any comments at the meeting and we headed home early. I must admit to being opposed to the Governor General taking a group to Europe at this time for cultural activities.

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