Monday Genea-pourri, Week of Sep 4–10, 2023

I have completed one hundred eighty-three (183) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. Besides phenology, I went to the history center twice, to a party on Saturday, and to Modesto with a friend to do some research.

Genealogy

Genealogy Meetings
I met for the last time with my mentee, as she turned in her portfolio to BCG. We will meet up in person later this month in Bangor. Jacqueline and I met for a short time discussing plans for our trip to Modesto for research.

On Tuesday, I accompanied Jacqueline to Modesto, the county seat for Stanislaus County, in order for her to collect the death certificates she ordered, and to look at the deed indexes on the computers in the lobby. We collected over 300 images of deeds from the computer screens of transactions involving her father and mother. He owned a construction company and built and sold a lot of houses. Next, we need to check the court records for any transactions. We also visited a cemetery for some tombstone photos. On the way back, we stopped at an olive oil tasting room and Bass Pro Shops where we bought some outdoor clothing.

Genealogy Writing
Writing this week was primarily on my research report on the Gleeson family. It is up to eight pages not counting images—I am primarily writing and creating the citations. I will add more analysis and correlation, along with some snippets, later.

Blog Posts:

My Grandfather Was a Carpenter. For Week 36, I wrote about my grandfather, Tom Johnston, who was a carpenter for the theme “tradesman.”

SNGF: Photos of My Mom. I included seven photos from her early childhood through to motherhood.

Genealogy Volunteer/Work
I went to the History Center twice this week, both Wednesday and Thursday afternoons to make up for missing Tuesday. I worked on the library inventory on Wednesday and on Thursday, helped with a visitor researching a piece of property in Alamo. Afterward, I entered recent donations into the accessions book.    

I prepared the agenda for the upcoming Sonoma County Genealogical Society Board of Directors meeting and sent it out along with the minutes. We're meeting this week. We still have no president or vice president of programs. 

On Saturday, I presented “Tips for Breaking Brick Walls” to the Seattle Genealogical Society. They were an attentive group and some described their own brick walls afterwards.

Webinars Viewed:

• Life Cycle of a Record: From Clerks and Clerics to You, the Digital User by Cindi Ingle (Legacy Family Tree Webinars) I highly recommend viewing this webinar to understand the purpose of records and how to discover that information. It's free through the end of September.

Other:
Our hike this week was at the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline’s Bull Valley Staging & Eckley Pier. We had planned to take the ridge trail east but it was closed due to tree removal, so hiked west toward Eckley Pier and Crockett. We saw some nice plants and the view of the Straits was nice.

The Fish Fry on Saturday was enjoyable, especially the fried halibut. We brought some of our home-grown tomatoes with slices of buffalo milk cheese and olive oil on top.

Finally, I watched a lot of US Open tennis and a few SF Giants games. It was enjoyable watching Coco Gauff win the singles title.

I am reading:

• How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny—FINISHED!

Photos for this week.

Here I am looking out over the Straits, taken by Karen; used with permission

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great at documenting our own. I will write about what I have 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.