Thomas Krehbiel: Blunk, Brinkman, Brown, Gray, Krehbiel, Renshaw, Schmidt Genealogy

Elmer and Anna Krehbiel's 25th wedding anniversary, April 1, 1950

Hi! Welcome to Tom's ever-growing collection of genealogy resources on my ancestry. (Someday I'd like to work on Cynthia's ancestry, too, but first I will need her cooperation!) I have the good fortune to possess a large number of Dad's family photographs, slides, reel-to-reel audio tapes, videotapes, and 8mm film. My ultimate goal is to "digitize" all of this into a form that you can view on a computer, maintaining a fairly good quality without spending exorbitant sums of money. (I have some background in audio/video and image processing, so I'm at least moderately qualified to do this.) As you might imagine, it's kind of a tedious process. But I'm getting there!

Enjoy,
Tom (May, 2006)

Genealogy Notes

I'm fairly new to genealogy, so it would be a huge mistake to think that I've done much "legwork" on my own. The vast majority of my data is based on the excellent work of others. My primary sources so far are:

Rev. Joh. Carl Krehbiel and J. J. Krehbiel's family tree (1903).
Paul G. Hirschler, Johannes Hirschler, 1760 to 1960 (1962).
Esther Krehbiel's family tree of Peter B. Krehbiel (1965).
Mary Lou Brown, Samuel W. Brown And His Descendants (1989).
James W. Krehbiel, Swiss Russian Mennonite Families Before 1874 (1995).
Donna Tebbetts, Tebbetts Courtney Krehbiel Genealogy.
Carol Anglen and her information about the Renshaws.
And many others I'm probably forgetting.

I can only claim credit for digging up some of the information on the Browns and Grays from the Library of Virginia.

Photo Caption Notes

If I wrote, eg. 197x, that means I think the picture was taken sometime in the 1970s. I tried to note when a picture was captioned by someone else by putting the caption in quotes. Some captions are more complete than others.

Scanning Notes

For the technically curious, most of the photographs were scanned at either 300 or 600 dpi with a Microtek ScanMaker 4900. The slides were scanned at 1800 dpi with a Plustek OpticFilm 7200. I tried to scan higher-quality photographs at higher resolutions so they could be re-printed. Most of the images were left "as is," except for some level correction. I did some retouching to some of the "important" pictures to remove scratches and so forth. I typically crop out any picture borders. The source material quality ranged anywhere from really good to really bad.

I typically scan documents and letters at 100 or 150 dpi.