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SNGF -- Your 2024 "Dear Genea-Santa" Letter

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 
It's Saturday Night again - 
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Our assignment tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is here. 

Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him your Christmas genealogy-oriented wish list: Write your 2024 Genea-Santa letter. Have you been a good genealogy girl or boy? What genealogy-oriented items are on your Christmas wish list? They could be family history items, technology items, or things that you want to pursue in your ancestral quest.

Here's mine:
I hope that Genea-Santa thinks I have been a good genealogy girl. I have written family stories on my blog for all 52 weeks of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. I hosted monthly round table talks with both the Contra Costa County Genealogical Society and the California Genealogical Society. I also hosted two RootsMagic discussion sessions while Keith was on vacation. I volunteered most months at the Oakland FamilySearch Center and weekly at the Contra Costa County Historical Society. There, I processed several collections and cataloged the library. I gave numerous genealogy talks, taught a course at AppGen, and facilitated a monthly writing group. 

The best gift received this year was from FamilySearch with their new full-text search capability. This is a real game-changer and it allowed me to locate documents that I would never have found without going page by page. My second-best gift was taking a research trip to Texas with a friend and getting documents from Erath County. The third-best gift was discovering the Contra Costa County newspapers at Newspapers.com.

My wish for Christmas this year is to have a successful research trip to Kentucky this spring. I hope to visit repositories in Clark County, Indiana, and in Jefferson, Shelby, and Lewis Counties in Kentucky, as well as the state archives in Frankfort.

I would also like more digital films to be included in the full-text search, even those records that have been indexed. Often our ancestors might be named but not indexed in a document and this tool will help us discover those.

That’s all I need, Genea-Santa. We have no chimney, so check the door and if you knock the signal, my husband who will likely still be up, can let you in. He’ll leave a treat – sorry, no sweets in our house, but we have the most delicious oranges and apples. 

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

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