My Trails into the Past

Happy Presidents Day! I have completed one hundred three (103) weeks of semi-lock down due to Covid-19. I went out to the History Center twice this week, the meadow for phenology, library to pick up a book, and a visit to Santa Rosa to our daughter’s. Genealogy Blog Writing : Females: Our Maternal Line I wrote about my maternal line up to my great-great-grandmother. I have photos, showing six from daughters to my great-grandmother. Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: RootsTech 2022. We were to write about our time at the virtual RootsTech conference. O nline Study Groups & Meetings Attended: Online meetings included Monday Morning on Zoom, meeting with Jacqueline on Monday, my AppGen partners on Wednesday to conduct interviews for a new administrative assistant, and the Peer group on Friday to check in with everyone’s progress. It was actually a light week for meetings! Amigos is on hiatus while two members are vacationing. Client Work/Presentations : I gave the vital re...

As I think about what I am thankful for, it is certain I am thankful for my family. I have five brothers and sisters and we all get along so well. We may not get together as often as we used to when our parents were alive and hosted most of the family get-togethers, but my sister, Sabrina is good about arranging at least one or two luncheons at the Spaghetti Factory where we all can eat together. We all live within a few hours of each other, so it is nice when we can get together. I am thankful that when our father died and I dealt with the settling of the trust, no one gave me any grief. There was no in-fighting. We divvied up his items amicably and everyone was a help in cleaning out his place. The women in the family also get along so well. We have “sister” celebrations for our birthdays and include now our nieces and daughters. Covid has put a kink in that celebration but I sure hope it can be revived soon, now that we’ve been vaccinated. I am thankful for our daughters, who thou...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing : 1)  Do you recall what you were doing in 2000?  Family, school, work, hobbies, technology, genealogy, vacations, etc?  If this doesn't work for you, what about your parents? 2)  Tell us in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook post. In 2000, I was 46 years old. I remember thinking as a ten-year-old, that I would be super old when the new century came and wondered if I would even be alive! Now forty-six seems so young. I was working at Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) as an Employee Development Specialist, Train Operations. I trained mostly the new hires. Norman worked at County Quarry Products.  During the year, we had our 20th anniversary. Most likely we had dinner at one of the restaurants in town. Our two daughters, Elizabeth and Margare...

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great 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. Genealogy Volunteered at the Contra Costa County Historical Society on Tuesday, working again on the Finding Aid. Probably about half way through the Special Collections. The two biggest collections will be the most challenging. Also spent five hours at the Oakland Family Search Library . We almost have more volunteers than patrons and most of the patrons are very self-motivated and need no assistance. So I brought a big box of slides to be scanned. In this way, I became familiar with one of the scanners so I can help a patron in the future. I spent a couple of hours scanning slides I had taken in my first trip to England and Scotland in 1975. The scanning part was simple, though time-consuming, but the biggest work was renaming each image and sorting the...

Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great 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. Genealogy I helped a researcher who came into the History Center this week to do some research in court records on men from China. She actually found quite a bit of information in our loose files. We had a very nice conversation with Tom Jones at our Writers SIG meeting. He gave us some great tips about writing and editing. What I took away from the talk: write about the person, not the research. Find the theme and weave that into the story: introduce it, draw it out in the narrative, and then end with theme. Watched a webinar about numbering genealogies, given by Alice Vogt Veen and then made more changes to my numbering in my KDP.  I have decided that I’m done making changes. It still matches the examples in Numbering Your Genealogy but I lea...

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week. Genealogy Intermediate Class . The third class in this six-week series was about land records. I covered both federal and local land records and created a couple of exercises. It took nearly 2.5 hours. I don’t think I have that much time at the Oakland class. I’ll have to cut something, I’m sure. History Center . Had a busy week at the History Center. Tuesday, I spent time working on the client’s work, and making copies for the high school event on Thursday. Sixty-plus students from Deer Valley H.S. came to the center as one of three stops (they also visited Alhambra Cemetery and the John Muir house). At the center there were five groups they rotated through and my station was in the county room. I spoke about the tax assessment books, showing them Mrs. Louie ...