Monday Genea-pourri, Week of June 18-24, 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

At the History Center, I continued working on the Finding Aid, especially those from the Special Collections. Also, a researcher requested an appointment with me in a week in July to work with court cases concerning Chinese. I’m looking forward to that.

Four of us met in the Certification Peer Study Group this week, checking in and discussing the proposed DNA standards for the BCG book Genealogy Standards.  We decided to make known our opinions.

I heard back from the client and he was pleased with the finished product. He asked for an additional “tree” showing the relationship of his mother to a great-great uncle and to see if the signer of the Declaration of Independence, Joseph Hewes, was related to his Massachusetts Hewes family. I was able to find a book, that was edited by a California Genealogical Society member in 1910, that gave genealogies of several separate Hewes lines.

I participated in the NGSQ study group on Tuesday morning, discussing the article, “George Craig of Howard County, Missouri: Genetic and Documentary Evidence of His Ancestry,” by B. Darrell Jackson (found in  National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Volume 99, No. 1, (March 2011): 59–72). It was a good discussion of an early DNA article.

For working on my certification portfolio, I have completed the draft of the second element, my development activities. I have also made progress on the research report and am working on getting it put together electronically. I had originally met with the client and gave the documents to her in person. I also counted out the number of pages I have so far. I’m doing okay on that front. The maximum allowed is 150 pages.

I attended three webinars live this week:

• BCG webinar “Using Maps in Genealogical Research,” by Sara Scribner, C.G. Beautiful images of maps and lots of great ideas of where to find different kinds of maps.
• APG Writers SIG meeting on “Writing for the Minnesota Genealogist and other Minor League Journals” by Jay Fonkert, C.G. I'm thinking about what I could write for this journal. 
• Utah Genealogical Association Virtual Chapter webinar “Researching Your World War II Ancestors,” by Michael L. Strauss, A.G. His lecture was also good for WWI research, at least when discussing NARA at St. Louis.

and one live class:

• “LGBTQ Genealogy” by Stewart Blandón Traiman at the California Genealogical Society library in Oakland. It was a great presentation with history, examples of sources, and a discussion about software issues showing today’s families. Got me thinking about my grandmother’s cousin, Erwin. I looked at online newspapers for articles about him. He was a musician and hair dresser but I didn’t find a lot of articles. I’ll have to look for specialty newspapers.

Met with the committee I’m working on for the International German Genealogy Conference to be held next summer in Sacramento. We meet weekly or so as a conference call.

Blog Writing: The only blog post written this past week:

• A 52 Ancestors post about all of the Elizabeth names in my database.

Other 

I worked in the native garden at the John Muir National Historic Park this week and took some photos of flowers currently blooming in the garden.

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