Monday Genea-pourri, Week of November 26-December 2, 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. This week we received homework for our Advanced Southern Research class at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG). It’s about doing some cluster research and I decided to work on one of my brick walls: Who are the parents of Samuel Johnston, who was born in South Carolina, had children in Alabama, lived in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, before moving to Titus County, Texas, where he died. I have no idea where in Alabama and where in South Carolina he lived. So we have a spreadsheet to record information about what we know, and also to begin analyzing the neighbors. I had already thought about that. Which neighbors also came from Alabama? Perhaps they came with the Johnstons.

I also did a little research on Reginold Lancaster, in order to write a blog post for the 52 Ancestors. I found I hadn’t downloaded the 1940 census for him, and discovered he lived in San Luis Obispo and owned land. The county recorder’s office has the deed index online and I’ve made a list of deeds to request.

I’m continuing on filing the digital images I have collected, working especially on my southern families. This will help me have the various families in my mind while I attend the SLIG class in January. I’m working on Loveless this week. I found Little Rock newspapers on GenealogyBank.com and have been collecting various articles found there. I make a clipped copy of the article, input the information into RootsMagic program, and then file it in the appropriate surname file. Sometimes, the articles trigger me to go on Ancestry to find a bit more information that I didn’t have. I’m surprised by how many 1940 census records I had not collected for some collateral lines.

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

Week 48: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks was about the second to last, and I chose Reginold F. Lancaster, who was the second to last child of George W. Lancaster and Martha Jane Polly.

I wrote about my favorite winter activities growing up for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Cert Support Group: Five of us met this week to discuss our progress over the past week and discuss Chapter 18, Research Reports, from the new Professional Genealogy book. This chapter was fantastic and a great improvement over the previous book. We decided that with the Genealogy Standards, the chapter is more coherent. The examples in the book were “real life” ones and I found them to be very helpful.

Webinars:

I participated in the DearMyrtle AmercianGen study group, where we discussed the two chapters on census records in Val Greenwood’s book Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy.

Other Activities

History Center: I continued uploading items from our special collections to the Online Archive of California. I have put up 45 collections so far. I’m very excited about this. Having descriptions of our collections on this website will bring our collections to the world at large and hopefully researchers from all over will contact us to research assistance.

NMRA Coast Division Meet: The four-times-a-year meet was held Sunday at the Boy Scout office in San Leandro. We arrived early to get set up for the auction and to put out my friend, Bill’s model train stuff to be sold. It was a big auction this time with over 500 items and lasted until after 4 pm. Instead of going to the clinics, I worked on genealogy on my laptop. I agreed to be put on the ballot for PCR Director this coming spring. The PCR convention will be in North Highlands at the McClellan Convention Center.

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