Monday Genea-pourri, Week of September 8–14, 2025

My outside activities this week were numerous. I volunteered at the History Center on Tuesday, had eye surgery on Wednesday, and had a follow-up eye appointment on Thursday. On Sunday, I attended a presentation by the Martinez Historical Society.

Genealogy

Genealogy Volunteer/Work:
I sent out the press release for the upcoming BCG-sponsored webinar. At the History Center, I worked on new accessions, and then, with the intern, we added descriptions of books in the library to the Excel database.

Genealogy Meetings: I attended the renewal accountability meeting and submitted the first proof summary about the first person in my KDP I’m working on. I got good feedback. Later, I attended the Kinseeker’s Military SIG, where we discussed the WWII morning reports. Jacqueline and I also met to discuss ways to use AI.

Genealogy Writing/Research:
This week, I worked on Ida (Hork) Colmann, my grandfather’s sister, and her husband, Martin J. Colmann. I found deed records in Los Angeles as well as numerous newspaper articles, and spent time entering the newspaper info into RootsMagic. I found many images using Full-Text search at FamilySearch in Alaskan documents for Martin, searching various spellings: Colmann, Colman, Coleman. 

I am not sure if all the M. J. Coleman images are of him. I will need to analyze and correlate to be certain. He lived in Eagle, Alaska, from about 1898 to 1904. I will make a spreadsheet to sort the data. For now, I created citations for each document with a full link to the document. I’ll transcribe or abstract when I work on the spreadsheet. What I need to do is learn about the government of the area and how it kept records.

Blog Posts Published:

Article Shows Gorrell Daughters as Top Students
For the theme of “in the news,” I wrote about an article I found about the school Amos Gorrell’s children attended, which listed the grades of the children.

SNGF – Your Top Five Surprises
We were asked to list five things that surprised us. I had a few that surprised me and a couple that didn’t.

Webinars/Courses Viewed: I played catch-up this week, watching webinars that I had missed. After the eye surgery, it was about all I could do.

• Using Historical Context in Your Genealogy Writing: A Gettysburg Soldier Case by Bonnie Wade Mucia (LFT Webinars)
• Creating an Ancestor Sketch by Thomas MacEntee (LFT Webinars)
• Manage Large Writing Projects Through Optimistic Start, Muddled Middle, and Triumphant Finish by Rhonda Lauritzen (LFT Webinars)
• Introduction to Civil Records by Ute Brandenburg (German Genealogy Headquarters)
• Zivilstand Records Introduced During the Napoleonic Era by Ute Brandenburg (German Genealogy Headquarters)
• Personenstand Records Introduced in 1874-1876 by Ursula Krause(German Genealogy Headquarters)
• Working with Marginal Notes on German Civil Records by Ursula Krause (German Genealogy Headquarters)

Other:
I had my second cataract surgery on Wednesday, and now I’m having trouble reading because I don’t have the right glasses. My eye appointment for glasses won’t be until November, so it’s been a struggle reading books and magazines. I can handle the computer fine, as the screens are further than my arm's length, and I just made the text larger.

Saturday, I participated in a Mt. Diablo Bird Alliance walk on Mt. Wanda, part of the John Muir National Historic Park. I hadn’t hiked in weeks, and it was a bit of a struggle as this walk has a 700-foot elevation gain, with some steep places. After lunch, I took a long nap. I’m sure this was also a result of the surgery aftereffects.

I am reading: 

• How Welfare Worked in the Early United States by Gabriel J. Loiacono (3/4 done)
• Coming up Short: A Memoir of America by Robert B Reich (3/4 done)

Photos for this week. Some shots from Mt. Wanda. 

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 © 2011-2025 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.