Monday Genea-pourri, Weeks of June 10-16, 2019

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

Education

I taught the third class of  the 5-class session on Intermediate Skills for the California Genealogical Society, being held at the Oakland FamilySearch Library on Wednesday evenings. I covered immigration and naturalization records, and discussed migration.

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks For week 24, the theme was “dear diary” and my post was a continuation of my aunt’s trip around the world based on her letters she had written home.
• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun I posted a favorite photo of my father, mother, my brother, and me, taken on Easter 1957.
• Eight Surnames. A meme went around in Facebook asking genealogists if they could name their eight great-grandparents. I decided to write a blog post listing both my eight and my husband’s eight.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended: 

No webinars, but I attended the International German Genealogy Conference held in Sacramento on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and ending on Monday. On Friday, Linda drove us up to Sacramento in the heavy traffic, which took us nearly two hours. After checking in, I met with Sheri and we attended the Bier Garten event at the nearby Verein. Saturday and Sunday was full of classes on German genealogy. I worked as a presenter host for three presenters. I met the other members of our Presenter Selection team and on Saturday evening our Thursday Cert Discussion group met for dinner. The classes I attended were:

Saturday

• From Church Archives to KGB Archives, Carolyn Schott
• Expand Your Research Beyond the Pension File, Ken Heger
• Lunch: Forget What You Heard The Real “Gold Rush” – A Woman’s View, Ingeborg Carpenter
• Many Paths to Lorenz’s Home: A Town of Origin Case Study, Theresa Steinkamp McMillin
• Immigration and Citizenship and the Consulate in Bremen, 1797-1850, Ken Heger

Sunday

• Best German Genealogy Website: Genealogy.net, Theresa Steinkamp McMillin
• Emigration from Hamburg and Bremen in the 19th Century, Andrea Bentschneider
• Sister Ports: Philadelphia and Baltimore, Debra A Hoffman
• Lunch: The German Immigrant Experience in the 18th Century, Michael Lacapo
• Timelines: A Path to Your Next Research Steps, Annette Burke Lyttle
• A Tale of Two Men in World War I, Gail Shaffer Blankenau

Monday

• Complex Thinking: Solving Research Problems Outside the Parish Records, Daniel R Jones
• Using Mitochondrial DNA Testing for Genealogical Problem Solving, Michael Lacapo
• Emigration to 18th Century America as a Career Move for Young Men, Marianne Wokeck
• Finding Your Family in Federal Records: US Consulate Correspondence Files, 1830-1912, Ken Heger

The surprising talks were from Ken Heger. I never thought about these NARA records and he was an entertaining and enthusiastic speaker. I also enjoyed seeing so many of my genealogy friends.

Volunteer Work:

I worked a short shift at the History Center, starting on the Mutnik collection with John. He’ll write it up. I also did phenology at the Meadow.

Own Work:

I am continuing the processing of the newspaper images from the Red Oak, Iowa newspapers and entering the information into RootsMagic before filing the images. It’s a good feeling to whittle down the images in the download folder.

Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.