Monday Genea-pourri, Week of July 18-24, 2022

I have completed one hundred twenty-four (124) weeks of semi-lock down due to Covid-19. I volunteered at the history center, did phenology, and went to Angels Camp & Murphys for a family reunion.

Genealogy

Blog Writing: My 52 Ancestors post showing the signatures of ancestors was highlighted last week and my post about Aunt Virginia was highlighted on Friday’s Family History Finds.

Fun Fact – My Aunt Virginia Was a Stewardess for Western Air Lines. I wrote about how my aunt Virginia, as a stewardess, took care of male passengers who asked for her phone number.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Plans to Travel for Onsite Genealogy Research I wrote about the articles I found in the newspaper about my grandfather playing baseball in Hamilton, Montana.

Online Study Groups & Meetings Attended:
Jacqueline and I discussed an upcoming trip to Turlock for research. I met with my Cert mentee, attended the Der Blumenbaum meeting, and took minutes of the Contra Costa County Historical Society board meeting.  

Client Work/Presentations:
I worked on my lessons for the upcoming AppGen course I’m teaching in the fall. It needs to be all written before I leave for NYC and Maine in September.  

Volunteer Work:
I volunteered at the History Center on Tuesday. I also wrote an article for the newsletter on the ledgers we have in the archives.

Own Work:
I worked on cleaning up files accumulating in my download genealogy folder. I found articles I had saved from online newspapers for the Hork family and entered the information in RootsMagic and filed the articles in the appropriate surname files. It was fun seeing the articles about my grandfather’s baseball games.

I also found some articles in Walnut Creek newspapers about my mother’s Girl Scout days. I entered those in RM and filed them as well.

Webinars Viewed: I viewed four webinars this week:

• Ancestor’s Religion in the USA by Carol Wright Whitton
• How I survived a Genealogy Emergency by Geoff Rasmussen
• Montana Genealogy Treasures by Janet Thomson
• Faded Echoes of the Civil War: correlating Evidence of Identity by Amy L Giroux

Other: We picked up our daughter in Petaluma on Monday, visited the Petaluma Adobe, and walked around the town before having dinner. I found a couple more used mystery books and a cute straw hat. She returned to NYC on Tuesday and the house was quiet again.

Over the weekend, we drove to Angels Camp. On Saturday was the Nilsen Family Reunion at a park in Murphys. There was a good turnout. It was pretty warm in the upper nineties but the park was nicely shaded. I did take time to check out the cute stores in town. Luckily, we found a place to charge the car and with the 90% charge, we could drive home without a top off somewhere. On Sunday, we visited the museum in Angels Camp and learned about the frog jumping contest, mining, farming, and other interesting histories of the area.  

I am reading:

• The Division Bell Mystery by Ellen Wilkinson—FINISHED!
  
• They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by Deanne Blanton & Lauren M Cook
  
• Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon
  
• Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon H. Chang
  
• On the Farm Front: The Women’s Land Army in World War II by Stephanie A. Carpenter

Photos for this week: 

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great at 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.

Copyright © 2022 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.