Passport Applications

I found an obituary in the 1901 Dubuque Daily Telegraph , a  Dubuque, Iowa newspaper and in trying to find a family tree for John Marxer, I came across a passport application.

I put together two (2) screen prints to capture the obituary and put both on the family tree. I was not sure which one looked better so I put both on the tree and the simple one as John’s picture.

I used the information that was in the obituary to build a family tree for John but I did not get a hint for a real family tree. What I did get was a picture for John’s wife.

How I found this photo is the subject of this blog.

When you are building a family tree on Ancestry.com you get many hints; census, residence, city directory, military, and passport applications. When building John’s family tree I got a hint for his widow’s passport application dated 1921.

A passport application can give you lots of information and sometimes even a picture of the person.

Many people get this hint and simply SAVE the transcript to their tree without looking at the original image.

Even when they look at the original image, they do not go into the next page.

 Page 2 of the application is where the photo is usually attached.

When you do go into the second page of the application you can use the screen print process and capture the photo of the person.

Once you have done that, then you can put that photo on the family tree.

The other thing that the actual passport application has is lots of information; address, birth dates, and even the reason they are applying for a passport.

In this case Margaret who has been living in the USA for the past 52 years, has been a widow for the past 20 years and is 83 years old is now going to live with her sister in Europe. In the application she writes that she does not plan on returning to the USA.

So don’t just hit the SAVE button, take a look at what you are saving!

 I hope this information will help you capture more info. from the stuff you may already have in your family tree file.

Thank You.