Monday Genea-pourri, Week of November 12-19, 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

Family Research. My goal before the upcoming SLIG institute in Salt Lake City in January, is to clean up my files and database of my southern families. It might be more than I can do, but I worked on some Johnston lines. I found newspaper articles in J-TAC about my grandfather’s brother who played football for them. This newspaper is found on The Portal of Texas History. I also worked on lots Loveless newspaper articles from Little Rock newspapers at GenealogyBank. Examples of what I found:

5 Oct 1937, J-TAC, p 3
Toofer is my great-uncle

 

27 Jun 1954 Arkansas Democrat, p. 8c
Lovetta in the center is my 1C2R.

SLIG Virtual Practicum. Our last class in the practicum was this Saturday. We finished up a case of multiple named men in English parish records. It was probably the easiest of the five and I was happy with what I could do. Overall the course was worthwhile and I learned something about how I work. I do like to use Word and keep track of my searches there instead of creating a separate research log, though working in a spreadsheet can be useful when analyzing data.

Blog Writing: I wrote two blog posts these two past weeks:

Week 46: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks was about a random fact. I wrote about Luther “Toofer” Johnston who was center for the John Tarleton Agricultural College in Stephenville, Texas in the 1930s.

Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. about our favorite genealogy resource. I wrote about all of the newspaper websites that I love to use. Last year we had the same topic and I wrote about FamilySearch.

CGS Introduction to Genealogy Course.  We’re working on a new format and I was tasked with creating a class on vital records. I have worked on the slides for that class this week. Then I’ll work on the handout.

Cert Support Group: We discussed Chapter 15 in the new Professional Genealogy book on Forensic Genealogy. I’m not really interested in doing this kind of work. I don’t mind doing record pulls for forensic genealogists.

AmericanGen Study Group. We met this week and discussed Chapter 13 “Vital Records” in Val Greenwood’s The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. I haven’t found the archive of the show online yet.

Webinar: I did attend the Florida State Genealogical Society’s webinar “Medical Genealogy: A Primer of Diseases That Killed Our Ancestors” given by Michael D. Lacopo. It was a great topic which he delivered very well.

Other Activities

This past week, I mostly stayed indoors due to the Camp fire up in Butte County that is sending smoke and poor air quality to the Bay Area. Whenever I left in the car, I kept the heater/AC off and used the seat heater to keep warm. The smoky air also kept the temperature in the 50s. I love “sweater weather” but would rather not have smoke. Hopefully next week it will rain.

I attended my two German language classes. The Wednesday class has ended for the quarter and will start up again in January. We’re reading a new book in the Monday class and will meet Nancy’s boarder from Germany next week.

I also drove into Oakland to do my volunteer work at the California Genealogical Society on Friday. Since many schools were cancelled, there was not much traffic. I didn’t expect any visitors due to the air quality, but I had two.

I spent time at the History Center on Tuesday, working on the Finding Aid, on Wednesday for the Board Meeting, and then again on Saturday, to ask Maxine about starting with entering the data at the Online Archive of California. We practiced by putting up three records. I’ll be glad when we have more collections up. This may bring in more researchers.

During Phenology at the meadow on Thursday, I saw lots of birds and recorded them at eBird. I saw my first robin and first Spotted Towhee for the season. I also saw for the first time a bunch of turkeys flying. Wish I had brought my camera, but only had binoculars.

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