My outside activities included three trips to the History Center, one to the Oakland FamilySearch Center, and weeding in my backyard.
Genealogy
Genealogy Volunteer/Work:
I had three trips to the History Center this week, the first my regular stint, the second for the board meeting where I took the minutes, and the third on Saturday. I brought home work and spent most of Sunday updating the library database.
Two members of my writing group came to the Oakland FamilySearch Center, and I helped with their issues with the Family Tree, but we also discussed other items.
Genealogy Meetings:
I attended meetings this week with the CDG renewal accountability group, the Kinseekers Military SIG, the CDG meeting, and the OFSC staff meeting on Friday.
Genealogy Writing/Research:
I conducted some research on my great-uncle, RD Lancaster after getting a hint from the NARA catalog. I also did some research on Amos Gorrell for my SLIG class presentation. I used ChatGPT to summarize a year of Amos’ diary from 1869. I will present my project about Amos’ neighborhood to my SLIG class on Tuesday.
This project was tedious because the PDF I created when I made the scans of the transcribed diary pages was not searchable, so I had to feed screenshots of each page to the bot. After a couple of hours, I had a nice spreadsheet of all the people mentioned in the diary. It would have taken me much longer to do it. I need to figure out how to rescan the pages of the other years or find someone who could make the PDFs OCR-readable.
Blog Posts Published:
Oldest Story: John Sellman of Maryland. For the theme of “oldest story,” I chose one of my furthest back ancestors and how I got the information from books.
SNGF—Five Funny, Strange, Interesting, or Unique Surnames in Your Family Tree I found five surnames from the beginning of the alphabet.
Webinars/Courses Viewed:
I attended the ninth SLIG class coordinated by Kimberly Powell. Jerry Smith and Melinda Kashuba gave lectures. I have my presentation ready for this week.
The webinars below are mostly from my catching up on webinars given during the marathon:
- A Matrimonial Advertiser: Tracing the Treacherous Trail of an Early 20th-Century Romance Scammer by Sharon Hoyt (BCG/LFTWebinars)
- Organizing Your Genealogy Files by Drew Smith (LFT Webinars)
- Links that Last: Managing and Understanding URLs by Cyndi Ingle (LFT Webinars)
- Beautifully Lay Out & Print Your Family History Book by Rhonda Lauritzen (LFT Webinars)
- Subjects, Citizens, and Serfs: Unpacking Germany's Historical Social Order by Andrea Bentschneider (LFT Webinars)
- AI Search on FamilySearch by Kelvin Brewer (OFSC Tips & Talks)
Other:
Most evenings we have spent weeding in our backyard in preparation for our vegetable garden, which mostly has tomatoes and peppers. Late rains this spring has caused the weeds and grass to really grow.
I am reading:
- Blood From Stone by Donna Leon
- Miss Merkel: Mord in der Uckermark by David Safier (for German class—up to Chap 32)
Photos for this week. Irises from my yard.
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.
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