Monday Genea-pourri, Week of February 17-23, 2020

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

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 8–Prosperity I wrote about the prosperity Dempsey Welch had because he was a large plantation and slave owner.

• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – A Bucket List Meme. It was a meme we’d done before and I updated a few new activities I had done.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended:   

The only online study group I attended this week was the Thursday evening one. We heard about Kim’s trip to NY and CT, and there was discussion about KDP and case study rules.

I attended these webinars this week:

• “A Convincing Argument or A Convoluted Mess?” by Barbara Vines Little, CG, a BCG webinar at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. I found her handout useful but got confused during the presentation.
• “Maximizing Time to Write More,” by Darcie Hind Posz, CG, APG Writers SIG. She had some great tips for getting in writing time.
• “Fan Out! Using Cluster Research to Break Through Brick Walls” by Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz, Virtual Genealogical Association (VGA). I have used many of her tips, but it was interesting seeing the Polish and Canadian examples.

Client Work/Presentations:

I presented to the San Ramon Valley Genealogical Society in Danville on Tuesday morning. I spoke on beginning German research. Afterwards, they took me to lunch. I remembered to bring the German Cards that the Sacramento German Genealogical Society sells and I sold ten of them.

I taught the third genealogy class of the winter quarter at the Acalanes Adult School on Thursday. This week we finished the discussion on census records and I presented about organizing your genealogy materials both on paper and digitally on their computer.

Volunteer Work:

I worked at the History Center, continuing to update the Newspaper Finding Aid with our new microfilm donations. Thursday evening we had our board of directors meeting, where I record the minutes. Our Desk Duty team had a meeting on Friday at the library and it was good to meet some of the other volunteers. We went over procedures, especially seeing where the emergency exits are located.

I started the first class of the Intermediate Records Class for California Genealogical Society at the FamilySearch Library in Oakland. I have twelve students, who all seemed very interested in the class. When I returned to the library to do my volunteer shift, I saw some of them working at the computers.

Own Work:

While writing the 52 Ancestors blog post on Dempsey Welch, I decided I needed to figure out what happened to all of his real estate—and figure out why there was no probate. His death occurred during the Civil War, but when looking at the probate minute book, there were other estates being probated. So I’ve created a spreadsheet and am recording the land purchased and searching for when the land was sold. I will probably have to follow all of his children’s land transactions, too, in order to reconcile all of his land. He started out buying land from the federal government, as there are twenty-one (21) transactions listed for him on the BLM website. There are also other Welch buyers and sellers, and I will need to reconcile those people as well.

I worked on the Hork Family Story on Sunday, typing up the preface I had written last week and started on the introduction about my parents early lives. I had been distracted by the Welch family and will make an effort to work on it more when my adult school course is completed.

My parents

On Monday, I met with Jacqueline for our bi-monthly study group. Since it was a holiday, we met at her house. She had a table with a spare monitor all set up for me which was so nice. I got some of the “Sources Documenting Death” presentation for the adult school class done. We ate at a great Phō restaurant for lunch.

Other:

I was so busy this week that I did nothing out of the ordinary. I did manage to go to my DVC gym class on Wednesday and Friday, and the yoga class on Tuesday and Thursday. Wednesday was a struggle, as I had to be in Oakland by 9:15 and I did not know how long it would take to drive there.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.