Monday Genea-pourri, Week of December 3-9, 2018

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. This idea came from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing, who started this meme.

Genealogy

Family Research. I worked on a couple of different lines this week:

• My mother, Lea Hork, was a member of the Junior Woman’s Club in Pittsburg, California, and I found several articles about her activities with the club—even two photos. Check out my blog post below about what I found. I also drove by my old home and St. Peter Martyr School, the school I attended. There appeared to be no school that day, so I was unable to check out the office to see if there were photos of our classes.

St. Peter Martyr School

• I am also working on Samuel Johnston, writing up what I know about him, his neighbors, and his children. I do hope this analysis can help me find out where they came from in Alabama and South Carolina.

Blog Writing: I wrote three blog posts this week:

• Week 49: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. about Amos Gorrell’s winter in Blackwater, Cooper County, Missouri in 1869, the year his son, Joseph, was born.

• I wrote a letter to the Genea-Santa for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

• I wrote about the news articles about my mother’s activities in the Pittsburg Junior Woman’s Club.

Cert Support Group: We spoke most of the hour about setting fees for professional research and record retrieval. We decided to revisit this topic again in January. We didn’t have time to discuss Tom Jones’ chapter in the new ProGen book.

Webinars: I attended the following webinars:

• DearMyrtle Wacky Wednesday

• Legacy Family Tree Webinar, “Ins and Outs of Indexes: Keys to Unlocking County and State Records” given by Mary Kircher Roddy.

Other Activities

History Center: I continued uploading items from our special collections to the Online Archive of California. I added ten additional collections this past week.

Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society: I used to be a member and decided to go check it out again Ted gave me a tour and then we operated some trains around the layout getting ready for a birthday party the next day. I plan to go again next Friday for the annual meeting and re-join.

I also did some weed pulling at the John Muir National Historic Park’s native garden at the Visitor’s Center. After the rain, I could see that the California Poppies popping up from seed. It will be a good poppy year this spring. 

Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.