Monday Genea-pourri, Week of May 15–21, 2023

I have completed one hundred sixty-seven (167) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. My outside activities included teaching at Acalanes Adult School, attending a concert with my daughter (masked), presenting to a genealogy group in Placerville, attending the CCCHS board meeting, and running trains at the train club. I actually entered stores and restaurants without a mask.

Genealogy

Blog Writing:

A Semi-bearded Ebenezer Loveless. For week 20 of 52 Ancestors, I showed a photo of my great-great-grandfather, Ebenezer Loveless along with his wife and his youngest child, my great-grandmother.  

SNGF: Then and Now – Oral Interviews I wrote about how I gathered the information for the Gleeson, Sullivan, and Hork family history I wrote in 1998.

Meetings/Discussion Groups
The only meetings I attended this week were the board meeting for the Contra Costa County Historical Society and the founders’ meeting for AppGen.

Volunteer
Because of my presentation in Placerville, I did not do my volunteer stint at the History Center this week. I did volunteer at the Oakland FamilySearch Center and hosted a discussion group on using online newspapers. We met in the computer lab so I could show the newspaper websites on the big screen. I focused more on browsing than searching.

Client Work
The last genealogy class at the Adult School was this past Monday and I covered organizing genealogy research on and offline. The course was well-attended all four sessions and they urged me to continue with more classes in the fall.

I created a video tip for our AppGen YouTube, scheduled to come out in June. I watched some of the sessions of the AppGen courses taught this past spring, both for my own interest and for evaluating the instructors.

On Tuesday, I drove up to Placerville to give my talk on farming ancestors to the Roots and Gold Dust Genealogy Society. It was a long drive, where I had to charge the car twice, once up and once back. Societies that have long business meetings before the speaker shouldn’t have the speaker come thirty minutes early. It was over an hour before I began my talk and then I had people leave before it was over. I don’t think I would agree to go up there again, even though they did cover my mileage. This group never had a virtual component during the pandemic.

Own Work
I worked on an article about a German settlement in Iowa for Der Blumenbaum. I need to finish that before we leave on vacation in a week. I also did some research on some Coor descendants that I DNA match on Ancestry.

Webinars Viewed.

• What's in a Name: Name Changes and the Law by Judy G. Russell (BCG/LFTWebinars)
• Graphics in Microsoft PowerPoint--Class 3 of 8 by Seema Kenney (Legacy Family Tree Webinars)
• Her Name was Not Unknown: Finding Female Ancestors by Gena Philibert Ortega (FSGS Poolside Chat)

I am reading:

• Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf
• The Wounded World: W.E.B. DuBois and the First World War by Chad L Williams
• Levi’s Dream: A 1930 trip to the national parks in a Model A Ford . . . with seven children by Linda Cottingham Killinger, et al.

Other
I attended the First Aid Kit concert at the Fox Theater in Oakland with my daughter on Monday. It was nice, especially when they sang together without the backup band. Their voices harmonize well. It was also my first trip on BART since the pandemic and I was glad my ID pass still worked.

There was no wildflower hike this week. I worked the Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society’s May weekend show running trains from the cabs. Seven hours a day are becoming really long days.

Photos for this week

And the concert attended:

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 © 2023 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.