Monday Genea-pourri, Weeks of June 24-30, 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

I taught the last class of  the 5-class session on Intermediate Skills for the California Genealogical Society, being held at the Oakland FamilySearch Library on Wednesday evenings. This last class was about planning a research trip.

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks For week 26 (the half-way point), the theme was “legend” and my post was about the legend of my maternal grandmother’s family having Native American ancestry.
• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun We started a series of questions posed by Ellen Thompson-Jennings and completed the first five. They are very interesting questions and I look forward to the next five.
• 8th Blogiversary! I have completed eight years of writing blogs on My Trails Into the Past blog. I linked my most viewed posts.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended: 

• I attended the Thursday Cert Chat and four of us were in attendance. It is so nice to have a place members feel safe in asking questions and making comments. We love to help each other!

• I also attended Gena Philibert-Ortega’s Legacy Family Tree Webinar on a “A Month’s Worth of Must Have Tech Tips.” She gave some nice tips and I didn’t know about how to save posts on Facebook.

Volunteer Work:

• I continued working to pull non-area clippings from the Contra Costa Times clipping files at the History Center. 

• I’m part of a group who are choosing speakers for an upcoming national genealogical conference. We met twice so far on Zoom meeting to help make decisions on tracks and possible lectures for each.

Own Work:

I went back to working on my photo archive and have been working on photos in various HORK folders. It is a time-consuming process. I look for the photo in my digital file. If the scan is too small, I re-scan it. I have an excel file with each of the photos, that are numbered and then described by date, persons in photo, occasion, date, and the file location and name, and finally the archive box location. I’m up to about 350 photos. I write the number of the corresponding entry onto the actual photo and then file in the appropriate box. I have three different sized boxes. If the photo is really small, I’m putting them into small envelopes I have left over from stamp collecting. I also add this number to the front of the digital image, too. So now my photos are not in chronological order anymore.

I also found some voter registration records from Multnomah County, Oregon for my Gleeson family. I have yet to process them, but at least they have been downloaded.

Other:

I worked with Shirley doing our weekly phenology survey at the Meadow. The apricots are ripe but too high to reach.

I also worked the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plants Society booth with Elaine at this year’s Beaver Festival in Martinez. Lots of people stopped by looking for plants to fill out their garden and we have photos of many different types.

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