Monday Genea-pourri, Week of July 30-Aug 5, 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

Volunteered at the Contra Costa County Historical Society on Tuesday, working again on the Finding Aid. Probably about half way through the Special Collections. The two biggest collections will be the most challenging.

Also spent five hours at the Oakland Family Search Library. We almost have more volunteers than patrons and most of the patrons are very self-motivated and need no assistance. So I brought a big box of slides to be scanned. In this way, I became familiar with one of the scanners so I can help a patron in the future. I spent a couple of hours scanning slides I had taken in my first trip to England and Scotland in 1975. The scanning part was simple, though time-consuming, but the biggest work was renaming each image and sorting them into chronological order. Some places I didn’t remember where they were, but uploading an image to Google Images, helped me find the location.

Participated in the Certification Peer Group. After checking in, we discussed what we would study next. The idea of reviewing the new Professional Genealogy book was most popular. We’ll start with the chapters most connected to the portfolio. I read the chapter about proof arguments and case studies, because that is the area of my portfolio that I’m working on.

Research work. The previous week, I received the book Columbia to the Rhine: Being a Brief History of the fourth Engineers, and Their Trip From the Columbia River, in the State of Washington, USA, to the Rhine River in Germany. This is the regiment that my great-uncle, Jack C. Sullivan, was in. After poking around in the website of the World War I Museum, I found this book. I was able to purchase it from Amazon. He is listed in the back under Company E. I’m in the process of reading the book from cover to cover. This way, I will learn about what the regiment did during World War I. Someday, I want to go to NARA in St. Louis to look for Morning Reports for his company.

Blog Writing: Blog post I wrote this week:

This week’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks was about “oldest” so I took the eldest child of a family and wrote about Philippine Mathilda Voehringer, who was the third great-grandmother of my children. I also wrote the next three posts, as I'll be away from my computer for three weeks. They are all scheduled to come on on Tuesdays.

Webinars: viewed this week:

“CompGen, Germany’s Genealogy Mega Site” presented by Teresa Steinkamp McMillin, CG.  This webinar is available at Legacy Family Tree Webinars for those with subscriptions. This site is full of wonderful resources on German genealogy. I have looked at it in the past, focusing only on the databases. Teresa showed us that there is so much more: a wiki, family books, gedcoms, gazetteers, funeral cards, to name a few resources. It is very strong with regional resources, which is very good to know! I will be adding this webinar to my German Genealogy Handout resource list.

Other

I helped Elaine pull weeds and tidy up the native garden at the sidewalk in front of the Kiwanis Club. After the weekend with over one hundred degree weather, it was a pleasant 80 degrees while we worked. It looked pretty good by the time we were finished.

My sister and brother have been evacuated from the Ranch fire near Nice in Lake County, so they are staying down here. We got together with the whole family at Spaghetti Factory for lunch on Sunday. It was great having everyone together and getting a chance to talk to my brothers. Us sisters get together often but not always with my brothers.

My sibs: for once we didn't stand in birth order

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