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Monday Genea-pourri, Week of August 12–18, 2024

I have completed two hundred and thirty-one (23i) weeks of semi-lockdown due to Covid-19. I was out more this week: dinner at Original Joes in San Jose, worked the CCCHS booth at the Lindsey Museum event, met with the archivist at Black Diamond Mines park, ran trains at the art gallery, and visited a dying friend in the hospital.

Genealogy

Genealogy Meetings:  
Jacqueline and I met twice, once on Monday where we caught up with things and again on Wednesday, as we were the only ones of the Amigos to join the Zoom meeting. I had three meetings with different committees about the upcoming 2025 NGS Conference. On Sunday, I attended book club where we discussed the Wild Girls book.

Genealogy Writing/Research:
I did a little more work with my Polly family research and writing. I also worked on some Lancaster and Loveless families as I was preparing the 52 Ancestors blog post. I discovered that something had happened to my RootsMagic file. All of the 1950 census entries are gone. I have no 1950 census source. Somewhere between April 2022 and today, I must have reverted to an earlier file. I wonder what other entries I have lost. Sometimes, I wonder why I have a document in a family member’s folder but not have it in RootsMagic. Likely, that would be another that was lost. I dread re-entering all those 1950 census records.

I visited the archives at the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve on Friday and have written an article for the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society’s newsletter. After publication in September, it will be placed on the website in the tab for places in the county to do research.

Blog Post Published:

Using the Attendees at Lela Ann (Loveless)Lancaster’s Funeral to Discover Residences. For 52 Ancestors’ theme of “Favorite Discovery,” I wrote about extracting residences from two of her obituaries for family members who attended her funeral. This was written again on my other blog, Mam-ma’s Southern Family.

SNGF: How Many Known 4th Great-Grandparents Do You Have? Randy asked us to count how many of our 7th-generation ancestors we have found. My numbers are pretty low.

Genealogy Volunteer/Work:
I continued working on the Pleasant Hill Historical Society Collection. I helped with the outreach table at the Wild at Night Under the Stars event at the Lindsay Wildlife Experience Museum fundraiser. We had a half dozen trivia questions for the participants to guess and collected 6 new memberships.

I finished sending out the press release for the upcoming BCG-sponsored webinar at Legacy Family Tree Webinars, which will be presented on Aug 20.

Webinars/Courses Viewed: none this week.

Other:
I operated trains again for the public viewing of the railroad art at Harrington Gallery in the Firehouse Arts Center in Pleasanton. We had some people return who visited during the week, who wanted to see the trains run.

A dear friend passed away this week and I visited him in the hospital. I have been a friend of his family for nearly 60 years. We used to attend foreign films in the city, go on birding trips in the Bay Area, and volunteer at the trolley museum. He will be greatly missed.

I am reading:

  • Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles—FINISHED!
  • Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit—FINISHED!
  • Doctored Evidence by Donna Leon
  • Journeys of the Forgotten by Jill Morelli

Photos for this week. We hiked the Bear Creek Trail of the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s property surrounding Briones Reservoir. The weather cooperated and we were mostly in the shade for the three-plus mile hike.






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.

Comments

  1. Your Monday morning photos always make me smile and I'm always amazed at how many different activities you fit into each week. Condolences on the loss of your friend.

    ReplyDelete

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