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Showing posts from December, 2017

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Make ONE Resolution/Goal for 2018

Randy Seaver for Genea-Musing has another great mission for us this week: Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to: 1) Did you make any New Years Resolutions, or state Goals and Objectives, for genealogy research in 2018? If so, tell us about them. 2) If not, then make ONE resolution, or state one goal, for your genealogy research that you are determined to keep during 2018. We'll check on progress toward that resolution/goal during the year in SNGF (if I remember!). 3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook status post or Google+ Stream post. I have never been one to have "Resolutions." They are so easily broken before the end of January. But I truly like the idea of goals. I have many goals: exercise more, eat better, write more in my blog, find more birds this year, etc... But my main goal this year is to turn in my BCG portfolio. I think I can make this hap

Monday Genea-pourri, Week of Dec 18-25, 2017

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Genealogy Sunday, I finished up the KDP. I printed it out and put it aside to read in about a week when it might look fresher. I started working on the Case Study again. I thought it was almost done, but I have lots of work still to do on it. I might try different approaches and see which works out the best. Working on the Case Study, brought out the need for a few documents from Todd County, Minnesota. There are no professional genealogists up there, nor none in the Minneapolis area willing to go up there. I made a request last summer for some deed records but they never got back to me. I’ll try once more with the request, then I’ll try a title company in the area. That email is all written and waiting in the draft box. I’ll probably have better luck if I wai

Monday Genea-pourri

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Genealogy The big news this week was finishing up on the last story of the KDP. I still have a few holes to fill on the second and third stories. The probate records from Merced County, California and the land record from Montgomery County, Iowa, should come in this week and that will be extremely helpful. I’ll need to do some editing and proof-reading both the text and footnotes. It feels good to be nearly 90% done with this part. The online session with the Mastering Genealogical Documentation hangout went very well. We were talking about Chapter 13, citing original online content. I focused on recording negative searches done online. If you’re interested in the recording, check out DearMyrtle’s YouTube channel. I worked at the desk at the California Ge

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Pauleen's Christmas Meme

Randy Seaver has another great SNGF this week. Our instructions are: Pauleen Cass (Cassmob), who writes the  Family history across the seas  blog started a Christmas meme in 2012 - see  Deck the Halls - 2012 Christmas GeneaMeme . So we will use that for SNGF this week (since very few readers did it in past years!): 1)  Copy and paste the meme questions into your blog or word processor, and then answer the questions.  You could use short statements, long paragraphs or provide a link to one of your earlier posts. 2)  Tell us about your meme answers in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. 3)  Be sure to leave a comment on Pauleen's blog post about your entry in this Christmas 2017 Geneameme.  She'll be surprised! Here's mine (questions in green, answers in red): THE 2017 CHRISTMAS GENEAMEME Do you have any special Xmas traditions in your family?     Growing up when the children believed

Monday Genea-pourri

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Nature/History I took my camera to the Meadow this week and got some interesting shots. The sun was shining nicely on the wooden cows at the fence. The Baccharis (coyote bush) was in full seed dispersal mode which made everything white. The moon was setting behind Mt. Wanda and I managed to get a nice shot. Also a shot of a California Scrub Jay. Wintertime, the recording of the phenology study goes pretty quickly, as many of the plants are in dormant mode. I also went on the first tour of John Muir’s grave site. A van took us out to the site and we learned a little about each family buried there: The Strentzels, the Muirs, and their children. We learned also about the Sierra Club coming to the site after Muir’s death. The large eucalyptus tree h

Monday Genea-pourri

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Genealogy The online session with the Mastering Genealogical Documentation hangout went very well. We were talking about Chapter 11, citing online sources and the exact place where the document was found. If you’re interested in the recording, check out DearMyrtle’s YouTube channel. I worked a bit with the KDP element of my certification portfolio, using the many documents that I photographed from Norman’s cousin. It gets very tedious reading it on the computer, so I have printed out the document in order to see it in a new light. I am about three-quarters of the way done—only one more person’s story to write. Most of the docs from the cousin will help fill in this story. The Friday chat with my certification buddies went really well. We’re reading No

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Genealogy Database Problem Report

Randy Seaver’s mission this week is to: 1)  Is your genealogy software family tree database perfect?  With no errors or inconsistencies?  Yep, mine isn't either!  Big time.  With over 49,000 persons there are bound to be some errors in my tree.  Even 1% would be 490 persons or 1,500 events! 2)  This week, find your genealogy software's "Problem Report" or something similar.  Tell us how you found it, and what it tells you about the problems in your family tree database. 3)  Share your results with us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post. I also have RootsMagic as my genealogy program and followed the same directions that Randy gave. I used the following criteria to find the errors: Criteria I used for the error report And my report came back with 21 errors. I have 7091 people in my database with 16,627 events. Twenty-one errors about of sixteen thousand or so events comes out to 0.126%, which is a pretty