Monday Genea-pourri, Weeks of July1-7, 2019

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

Education

This week I taught one of the Introduction to Genealogy classes we teach on the first Saturday of the month at the California Genealogical Society’s library. My topic, of the four we teach, was about vital records. I started with two students but ended up with seven. They were very attentive and asked great questions. Afterwards I helped one young lady with a census record she had. She was trying to find out where her gg-grandmother was buried. The census showed the 10 year old living as a boarder, however her younger sister had the same first name as the head of household’s wife. I suggested she research the couple. They might be kin.

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks For week 27 our theme was Independent. I wrote about my great-aunt, Carrie Hork, who never married, but led a very active life.
• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun We continued the series of questions posed by Ellen Thompson-Jennings and completed the six through ten.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended: 

I attended the Friday Cert Chat and four of us were in attendance. We talked about Dennis’ course at GRIP and welcomed a new member. We have decided to study Tom Jones’ book, Mastering Genealogical Proof, by re-reading Chapters 5, 6, 3, and 7, in that order. I will miss most of the discussions due to vacation time.

I attended three webinars this week, some by viewing the archive version.

• "Reasonably Exhaustive" Considering Limitations on Time and Money" given by Paul K. Graham, CG. for the UGA. He compared the GPS and it's reasonableness when having clients, and spoke about how to be more effective and not waste time.
• "5 Steps to Becoming a Good Ancestor" by Marian Pierre-Louis for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. She gave many ideas on how to preserve your genealogy for the future, and I found I do many of these already. My current goal is to write more books.
• "Remedies for Copy and Paste Genealogy" by Cyndi Ingle for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

I also participated in the next-to-last class of the American Gen Study Group with DEARMyrtle. We discussed military records after the Revolutionary War. All of us had lots of different examples and we went overtime. I discussed my WWI problem with my great-uncle, Jack C. Sullivan and the research I hope to do at the National Personnel Research Center in St. Louis next month.

Volunteer Work:

At the History Center, I continued working to pull non-area clippings from the Contra Costa Times clipping files. I am almost done! Then I’ll consolidate them to fewer drawers and relabel the drawers. 

We are making progress on choosing speakers for an upcoming national genealogical conference. It is difficult making these choices because so many sound wonderful.

Own Work:

I spent a great deal of time downloading images of newspaper articles from Newspapers.com. I worked on HORK family articles from Hamilton, Montana, SIEVERT family articles from Joliet, Illinois, and HORK/QUIGLEY families in Napa, California. So much has been added to the site since I last checked. This time I have been more diligent in transcribing and entering the information into my genealogy program. I want to do better keeping up on the work. Part of this work was instrumental in writing the blog post about Carrie Hork.

Other:

I worked with Shirley doing our weekly phenology survey at the Meadow. It is so much nicer there with the recently cut path to walk on. I got a few shots of flowers and acorns.

Visit with family. We took a trip up to Sebastopol to visit with Elizabeth. The drive up on Highway 37 was slow and it took us over 2 hours to get there. We helped with her vegetable garden by fixing the sprinkler system and pulling some weeds. We then ate at Wishbone, one of the restaurants where she works. The risotto was delicious.

Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.