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Monday Genea-pourri, Week of March 20–26, 2023

I have completed one hundred fifty-nine (159) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. My outside activities included working at the History Center, doing phenology, bird watching, having lunch with my sisters at Jack’s, and enjoying San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with my husband and daughter on my birthday.

Genealogy

Blog Writing:

Membership--Swedish-American Church Records Provide Fine Details I gave examples of how the membership pages in these church records give vital records and place of origin information. It was highlighted on Linda Stufflebean’s Friday’s Family History Finds.

SNGF: A Fearless Female Post (sisters Susanna & Wilhelmine Radunz) I chose to find a problem and create a timeline. Here is hoping to locate Susanna’s and Wilhelmine’s parents.

Meetings/Discussion Groups
This week I met with Jacqueline and we discussed her writing sample, Amigos where we caught up on our activities, and RootsMagic SIG and watched Stewart as he created citations. I attended the third of the series of Mastering Word with Tom Jones, where he covered creating tables and figures.

Volunteer
At the History Center, I finished creating a new collection and wrote up the finding aid. I added new finding aids to the Online Archive of California. I also accessioned some items.

Client Work
The Acalanes Writing Group met on Thursday and we discussed Nancy’s and Jacqueline’s writings. They both are coming along well with their projects.

I taught my first AppGen class on probate records, covering records that document death, probate terminology, probate law, and how to locate probate records on FamilySearch. I have fifteen students and all seemed excited to get more deeply into probate records. Five have turned in their homework for review already.

We had our AppGen Founders’ meeting and selected fall course proposals that we would like to see fleshed out more.

Own Work
I had done some research on my father-in-law’s sister, Claire, and entered those documents into my genealogy database before filing. I hope to work on the Joliet diocese records some more.

Webinars Viewed.

  • Uncovering Immigrant Origins Through Cluster Research by Dana Palmer            (BCG/LFTWebinars)
  • Margaret's Baby's Father & The Lessons He Taught Me by Elizabeth Shown Mills (Legacy Family Tree Webinars)

 I am reading:

  • Gateway to Victory: The Wartime Story of the San Francisco Army Port of Embarkation by Captain James W. Hamilton
  • Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage by Nathalia Holt
  • Researching U.S. WWI Military Members by Margaret M. McMahon, PhD.

Other
I bird-watched with the ranger and volunteer at the John Muir National Historic Park on Saturday. We saw three species of hawks as our highlight. Afterward, I went to the Watershed Nursery in Richmond to buy some native plants. After weeding in some spots, I planted them in the front yard with other growing natives.

We celebrated my sister, Danna, and my birthday on Friday by having lunch at Jack’s Restaurant in Pleasant Hill. It was so nice getting together and we need to do it more often.

On my birthday on Sunday, we met our daughter in San Francisco, where we visited the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. We walked around through the trees afterward looking for birds and then drove to PPQ Dungeness Island, where we had fresh Dungeness crab.

Photos for this week. Some of the tropical flowers we saw at the Conservatory.




Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great at 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.

 Copyright © 2023 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.

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