Monday Genea-pourri, Week of Mar 23-29, 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.

I have completed two weeks of “lock down” due to Covid-19. I left the house twice: to do phenology at the meadow and to pick up a bird feeder set-up. I did stop on Thursday at a drive-through Starbucks to get a London Fog latte. My husband and I have walked, mostly to the local mailbox. I continued taking photos of birds or plants and posted on Facebook. My friends seem to appreciate them.

Genealogy

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 13: Nearly Forgotten “Three Sons Named Edward”. I wrote the eight children of Thomas and Mary Davey who did not live to adulthood.

• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – A Facebook “Have You Done This? Meme We were asked show our favorite genealogy reference books. I made a small list and showed the images from my Library Thing account.

• An Update on Peter H Hutson: Did He Run a Hotel? A write up about the clues I found in newspapers and family trees that the Hutsons may have had a hotel in Gustine.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended:   

I attended no in-person activity. We met on Thursday evening and discussed the Coronavirus mostly but did discuss some of what genealogy we were doing.  On Friday, four of us met and discussed our progress and what we would now work on as we have more time.

Webinars I attended:

• City Directories: Much More than Ye Olde Phonebooks by Mike Mansfield at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. I picked up some good tips and his lecture was using these at My Heritage. They have some interesting tools.
• Strategic Searching on Find My Past by Jen Baldwin at the webinar series put on by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. I learned some great tips on using Find My Past. Hope to try that out soon.
• Using Fold3 To Your Advantage by Craig Scott at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Fold3 has always been a hard website to use. He made it seem less confusing and that browsing is important to find those records not indexed.
• A Japanese American Family by Linda Okazaki at New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. It was her first webinar and she did great. I really liked the format of her webinar. She spoke first in  general about the kinds of records and then showed them as she spoke about the family.

Client Work/Presentations:

There has been no client work or teaching. Though I did make contact with the six students who were enrolled in my Intermediate class at the Acalanes Adult School to see if any would be interested in an online class.

Volunteer Work:

There has been no volunteer work either, except I answered a query for the Contra Costa County Historical Society. I also wrote an article about the 1918 flu in Contra Costa County for possible submission in their newsletter.

Own Work:

I worked on Hutson family research, focusing on newspapers and deed records. I made contact with an owner of a tree on Ancestry and she answered back. I now have permission to use the photos she posted.

I have also been trying to process, transcribe or abstract, and then enter into my RootsMagic program those files I had previously saved. If I can get my scanner to talk to my computer, I’ll try to scan some things during the next week. I do need to do more writing!

I worked on organizing the deeds in Sampson County, South Carolina of Daniel Coor and wrote a nine-page report with images. I may post to my blog next week.

Other:

I passed another yearly milestone (66) on Thursday. We celebrated by ordering take-out from a local restaurant. My husband bought me a hanging bird feeder station. Looking forward to watching the birds from our porch.

My dear sister-in-law, Val, passed away this past Thursday. She leaves a husband, a son, and two nephews she had been caring for. She loved reading, cooking, and being with family. She will be dearly missed.

We spoke with both daughters, who both work in the restaurant business and are out of work. We worry a bit about the one in NYC, where the pandemic seems the worse. But she is afraid enough to be careful. 

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