Monday Genea-pourri, Week of September 17-23, 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

This week has been primarily spent working on the five lessons I will be teaching in October & November at the Oakland FamilySearch Library on behalf of the California Genealogical Society. This is an intermediate level course, focusing on another set of records: military, tax & other lists, cemeteries, newspapers, and writing. I currently have eight (8) people signed up and there is room for more. To register, go to the CGS website here.

I also viewed several webinars this week:

• "Using Lists to Find Proof" by Cari Taplin, who presented this on behalf of the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG). The recording can be found at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. This was helpful in working on one of my talks.

•  "25 Simple Research Hacks Every Genealogist Should Know" given by Lisa Alzo at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Best tip was creating SMART goals. 

•  “Writing for Ansearchin’ News, the Quarterly Publication of the Tennessee Genealogical Society.” by Tina Sansone. This was presented to the Association for Professional Genealogists (APG) Writers SIG. I need to see which of my ancestors lived in Tennessee. 

• Wacky Wednesday at DearMyrtle. Cousin Russ Worthington spoke about how he dealt with Find A Grave memorials that disappeared. He had the sources but they were no longer on the site. Most of them had been merged into duplicate memorials. 

• “But it’s all on the Internet!” by Peggy Clemens Lauritzen, AG for the Florida State Genealogical Society. She gave great examples of records that are found in libraries, archives, and historical societies. One tip was the Ohio Genealogical Society library has old German newspapers that have not been digitized.

I also volunteered at the Contra Costa County Historical Society on Tuesday, continuing on entering the Finding Aid into PastPerfect and attending a meeting about our upcoming event: Archives Crawl, which will be on Saturday.

Portfolio work. No portfolio work last week, with my focus on the Intermediate course material.

Blog Writing: Blog posts I wrote this week:

• This week’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks was about unusual sources and I wrote about my grandfather, Tom Johnston’s wallet and the cards found inside. 

• I also wrote about my earliest memory for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. I had participated a quite a while due to either my vacation or repeated themes.

 Since all of my free time this past week was spent writing, I didn’t do much exercise or other activities. My back is taking the brunt of all the sitting. I’ll take more time stretching and walking this week.

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