Monday Genea-pourri, Week of Apr 6-12, 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 four weeks of “lock down” due to Covid-19. I left the house only to do phenology at the meadow, take a photo of the pink moon, and drop off elastic at my friend’s porch. My husband and I have walked, mostly to the local mailbox. I love taking photos of birds and plants for my friends on Facebook.

Genealogy

Blog Writing:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 15: Fire-“A Piece of Bad Luck”. I had written this post in 2015 about Daniel Matt Coor’s grinding mill catching on fire and he lost his life.

• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – The Games Your Family Played.  I had fun describing the games we played as children from board games to outside games.

Webinars/Study Groups Attended:   

Many more online meetings again this week:

• Monday, Our CCCGS Monday Morning Group met and this week we each spoke about something genealogical. Our friend, Nan, who moved to Kansas was able to join and it was nice seeing her. I also met with Cari Caplin’s NGS study group and we had the author with us, which was very enlightening hearing about the research and how she wrote up the article.
• Wednesday, I met with the Jill Morelli’s Certification Discussion Group. We discussed the “homework” but also discussed many other things. I also jumped into DearMyrtle’s Wacky Wednesday. I hadn’t participated with them in a long time.
• The Thursday evening group met and we discussed some genealogy and some on the virus. We promised to speak more on genealogy.
• Our Friday group discussed the virus some, then moved onto genealogy and online classes. We decided to study a NGS Quarterly article once a month and picked one from the current March 2020 issue.
• Met with the Military Discussion Group on Saturday. We asked questions of Jennifer or others in the group and learned sources to find oral and unit histories, and discovered a new database on Ancestry for military personnel before WWI.

Webinars I attended:

• Decoding Social Security by Michael Strauss at Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
• PERSI: Spanning the Generations by Jen Baldwin at NYG&B. It was a good webinar on using PERSI to it’s fullest.
• Finding Your WWI Ancestor by Debra Dudek hosted by the US World War One Centennial Commission. I have been doing WWI research but learned of a database with images at FamilySearch that I hadn’t heard of before. It’s the “United States, Veterans Administration Master Index, 1917-1940.” She suggested looking here first and if I had done that, I would have found the information I took so long finding for my great uncle, Jack Sullivan. She went really fast but we got an updated version of her book and the slides of her presentation with clickable links.

Client Work/Presentations:

I cancelled the Acalanes class this week and let the students know. They will receive a full refund.

Volunteer Work:

This week I did some work for the Contra Costa County Historical Society, one by answering an email query and the other by being interviewed by a news reporter from KRON4 News. She conducted the interview over Zoom and it was telecast Wednesday evening on the 8, 9, and 10 o’clock news. I was interviewed about the 1918 flu epidemic and comparing it to day’s coronavirus. The link to the interview is here. I also helped our president use Zoom so we can use it next week for our board meeting.

I also wrote up two more articles about the 1918 influenza for the Martinez Historical Society and the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society.

Own Work:

I have been working on my husband’s Bishop line, primarily processing files I had collected at the Family History Library back in 2016. I began to write up a story about Frederick Bishop, his third great-grandfather. Then my computer locked up/froze and when I rebooted, I forgot to save the document. It’s going to be hard to recreate it. I had worked on source citations and didn’t save them anywhere else. I need to remember to name new documents as soon as I begin them, so this doesn’t happen again.

I learned how to make a surname word cloud and add the images to both of my blogs. Thanks to Nancy Loe of Sassy Jane Genealogy.

Other:

My three German language classes all began this week, so now more of my days will be filled up. They are smaller and I might get more practice this way. Many birds have come to the feeder and I had a hooded oriole in the pomegranate tree. And I had a ukulele lesson again with Zoom. I feel less intimidated playing over the computer! But it is very hard to play together because of the lag.

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