Monday Genea-pourri, Week of Oct 23–29, 2023

I have completed one hundred ninety (190) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. This week was spent mostly at home except for going to the History Center and Train Club show.

Genealogy

Genealogy Meetings
This week I met with Jacqueline and we discussed possible homes in Oregon. At Amigos, we discussed what we would prepare for meals at our November writing retreat. Monday, I hosted the CCCGS roundtable meeting where everyone shared what they were working on.

The RootsMagic SIG was hosted by Stewart and me. He covered how to create or edit fact sentences, and I covered how I use the free-form source citation template, which is not really a template, but I showed how I use it as such.

Genealogy Writing
The only writing I did this week was the blog posts I published this week and a couple that I will schedule for next week. I did some research for my Tierney family in newspapers and discovered that more of them had immigrated to the United States. Time to do some census work.

Blog Posts:

Dig a Little Deeper. For week 43, I took a 1900 census record showing my great-grandparents, John H. and Ann Sullivan, and how I used information from various columns to seek out more information. I used maps and images to support this writing. Linda Stufflebean highlighted the post in Friday’s Family History Finds.

SNGF: Where Were Your 16 2^nd Great-grandparents Born, Married, and Died? This post is a strict listing of my sixteen great-great-grandparent’s vital records and lists of residence. I used my daughter as a starting point so I captured my husband’s and my great-grandparents.

Genealogy Volunteer/Work
John helped me finish up the last bit of the inventory in the library at the History Center. I also finished entering new accessions into PastPerfect. On Thursday, I hosted the board meeting and took the minutes. On Saturday, the small strategic planning committee met on Zoom and we got a good start, planning what to study and when to meet.

I had the first class of the Applied Genealogy Institute class on land this week and have fifteen students. Again, I ran out of time and did not do the last in-class activity. We would have time if we did not do introductions, but I think that is important for the class to feel comfortable with each other since this is all done online.

Our writing group met and we discussed Nancy’s piece on her family in New Mexico. She is adding some wonderful historical and cultural context which adds a lot to her story.

Webinars Viewed: I viewed three webinars on Legacy Family Tree Webinars this week. ESM’s was excellent of course and I recommend Michael Lacopo’s, too.

• Dissection & Analysis of Research Problems (10 Steps to a Solution) by Elizabeth Shown Mills
• "She Came From Nowhere. . ." - A Case Study Approach to a Difficult Genealogical Problem by Michael Lacopo
• Are You Missing Important Family History Clues in Your Old Family Photographs? By Lisa Lisson

Other: This week’s hike was on a trail on the east side of Mt. Diablo State Park called Mitchell Canyon. The highlight was seeing two tarantulas crossing the trail. The native grape was in full color as well as the poison oak and maples.

I am reading:

• Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite by Dean King 

Photos for this week. 

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.