My Trails into the Past

Randy Seaver of Genea-musings has a new challenge today. * Tell us about your "other" hobbies or interests outside of genealogy and family history research, writing, speaking, etc.  Be mindful of your family's privacy, though!   * Write a blog post of your own, respond with a comment to this post, or write a Facebook status post or a Google+ Stream post. My immediate family thinks all I do is genealogy. It is true that every day I try to fit in genealogy as part of my day.  In the morning I check emails and Facebook to see what’s happening in the genealogy world. If someone describes a new database, I usually think of someone in my database that this might apply to and do a quick search. I also multitask while watching television with my husband, either writing a blog post, searching in Ancestry or FamilySearch, or entering data into my genealogy program. But I do find time to do other things. Exercise I try to play Pickleball three days a week (Mon/Wed/...

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music!), is to: 1) Most of us collect dead ancestors and relatives now - what did you collect when you were a child or teenager, or adult? 2) Tell us about your collections in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post. I was a big collector as a kid. Stamps. I started stamp collecting in the 5th grade. GeorgeAnn Olander collected stamps and got me started. In those days, one could buy a bag of cancelled stamps for less than a dollar. It was a great way to start. I later settled on collecting only United States Stamps. Troll Dolls. My first Troll Doll was also in the 5th grade. I paid 79 cents for it and it took two weeks of saving my allowance to buy it. It had pink hair. My Mom made clothes for it from felt fabric and a pattern she found at J.C. Penney. The next one purchased fit on top of a pencil. You could also get miniature ones in th...

1) Since this was Back to the Future week, I have a related challenge: Do you recall what you were doing in 1985? Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc? 2) Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook or Google+ post. What was I doing in 1985? I'd been married for just 5 years and we were living in our current home in Martinez. No kids yet. I was working for Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) as a train operator, probably working on the Concord to Daly City line. Somewhere in storage I have my run notebooks and could probably figure out what shift I was working.  It was probably something like 1130-1930 with Tuesday and Wednesdays off because I had lousy seniority, since I had only been there 7 years. My hobbies at the time did not include genealogy. I was a member of the Walnut Creek Model Railroad Society. I might have been Secretary, but I can't remember when I was first elected. The club me...