Monday Genea-pourri, Week of May 13–19, 2024

I have completed two hundred and nineteen (219) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. I went out three times: History Center twice and to Train Club for our weekend show.

Genealogy

Genealogy Meetings:  
Jacqueline and I met and reconciled our expenses. We each paid for various motel rooms and somehow managed to be very close—she owed me only a hundred dollars. Next up is to work on a Shutterfly book of our adventure.

I attended Kinseekers Military SIG on Monday and the focus was on World War II. From that, I decided to send away for Jack Sullivan’s claim file. I sent it off to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis by email and got a reply that his death was too recent for them to have the file. With the email address they gave me for the VA, I sent an email to them. I haven’t heard back yet.

Genealogy Writing/Research:
Writing and research this week were mostly my blog posts. I continued processing the documents I collected on the research trip and worked on the ones about Nathan HO Polly.

I worked on another article for Der Blumenbaum, the journal of the Sacramento German Genealogy Society on archiving paper files.

Blog Post Published:

Ethel Elizabeth Sullivan Attended a Business College in Portland, Oregon. A 1912 city directory pointed me to a business college attended by Ethel Sullivan and I expanded the research to the business college.

SNGF: Use FamilySearch Full-text Search. I wrote about finding another document that named NHO Polly. It was a marriage record where he was the officiant. It was in a new county – another place to research him in.

Genealogy Volunteer/Work:
I volunteered at the History Center on Tuesday and dropped by on Saturday. I worked on a query and John and I went through the boxes of possible additions to the library. I will need to enter them into the database before they can be shelved.

I presented my church records presentation to the San Joaquin Genealogical Society on Thursday.

The Acalanes Writing Group met this week. Jacqueline and I updated them on our research trip and then we discussed Sheila’s chapter about why her ancestor left Scotland. We planned four more meetings during the summer.

I was selected as a Hive Minder for the upcoming fall SLIG virtual class “An Advanced Study of Death: Cemeteries, Death Records, and Material Culture” coordinated by Gena Philibert-Ortega. I’m super excited. I am disappointed that Jan Joyce’s class filled up and I’ll probably not be able to take it as well. Maybe next year.

Webinars/Courses Viewed:
This was a busy week for classes and webinars. First, I attended the BCG Education Fund classes given by Jan Joyce and Sharon Hoyt. Both were excellent. Jan’s class was interactive and we had several exercises to try out her techniques.

• Deconstruct to Reconstruct: Writing Proof Arguments for Maximum Impact Jan Joyce   
• Organizing and Analyzing Evidence for Genealogical Success Sharon Hoyt     

I also attended the National Genealogical Society (NGS) conference which was held virtually over two days. These are the sessions I attended. Over the next three months, I can view the other sessions offered.

• Plenary Session - Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy: The First Year and Onward by Steve Little
• Four Farms, Four Names: From Research Report to Award-Winning NGSQ Article by Yvette Hoitink
• What's New at Ancestry in 2024 by Crista Cowan      
• Illuminating Ancestors' Lives in Small Bites through Focused Themes and Engaging Narratives by Diana Elder      
• Rapid Roots: Seven Share their Secrets in Seven Minutes by multiple people
• Keynote Panel on Artificial Intelligence and Genealogy by multiple people
• Assembling Cryptic Bits of Documentary Evidence and DNA to Answer Major Genealogical Questions by Tom Jones
• Hand-written Text Recognition: Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence to Transcribe and Search Documents by Yvette Hoitink  
• Research Planning: The First Step to Solving Tough Problems by Jill Morelli
• Finding Frances: A German-American Case Study in Community, Illegitimacy, Immigration, and Interstate Migration by Nancy A. Peters, CG          
• Discovering Buried Treasure: Miscellaneous Papers and Mixed Provenance Records by Cheri Hudson Passey  

Lastly, I viewed the recording of the APG Writers SIG program. Her planning process for writing using sticky notes is brilliant.

• Using Narrative Blueprints to Structure Writing Projects by Kim Richardson

Other:
I spent most of my free time either pulling weeds whenever the yard was shaded or watching old episodes of The Man From UNCLE which I found on the Internet Archive. I shall download a few episodes to watch while I’m traveling on the train to New York later this month.

I am reading:

• 101 Things You Didn’t Know About World War I: The People, Battles, and Aftermath of the Great War by Erik Sass (not much reading while on vacation)

Photos for this week. No hike this week because I was in the Education Fund class. Here are some shots of wildflowers from Texas.

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 © 2024 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.