SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
April 1, 2008
97th Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, May 6, 2008.
3. Has everyone made their mandatory assessment of $5.00 for the year of 2008.
4. Is there any other Old Business or New Business that we should take care of?
5. The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Everyone is invited. David Silver, a noted collector, writer, and lecturer on the history of photography, as well as being the president of the International Photographic Historical Organization will be giving a talk on various photographic processes that were used in the 19th century, how researchers today identify them, and further strategies for dating them. Come early at 7:00 P.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.
6. Please note again that the scheduled meetings for the San Mateo County Genealogical Society have changed from the second Saturday and the second Wednesday of the month to the third Saturday and the third Wednesday. The Society does not meet in the months of August and December. So please adjust your schedule accordingly.
7. As I have announced for the passed several months now the San Mateo County Genealogical Society had its Spring Seminar on March 29, 2008, that was last Saturday, and it is now history. If you did not attend this fantastic program, you missed a superior performance. The theme for the meeting was “Your Immigrant Ancestors”. Six speakers talked about how and where our immigrant ancestors came to the United States. Each speaker talked about the different ways our ancestors came to this country. It was an extremely interesting meeting, and everyone who did not attend missed extremely important information of how to trace their own lineage. There were over 100 who attended, so you can see how popular these Seminars are. Almost every seat in the house was taken. There was two from our group who attended, Bob Shoemaker and myself. Russ Brabec assisted in setting up the meeting and also straightening things out after the meeting was over. He could not attend the meeting because of other responsibilities. The Keynote speaker was Stephen Morse, who talked about his One-Step Webpages that he had created, which is a potpourri of Genealogical search-tools for tracing one’s ancestors. He constructed a Website that lets you use all these tools at no charge. This is a copy of his Website, which shows some of the Genealogical Websites that one can go to dig up information. There are 6 pages of Websites that one can access for information. His website is http://www.stevemorse.org. There is enough information to keep you busy for the rest of your life. Copies of this 6-page report can be obtained on Steve Morse’s Website. Chris Green talked on the subject “Before You Cross the Pond”, which discussed the manner in how to find your ancestor’s place of origin. John Gleed talked on “UK Passenger Records” and “Immigration from Canada to the United States.”. Stephen Danko talked on “Eastern European Genealogy” and “A new look at Passengers Manifests”. James Smith talked on “Early San Francisco Records including Passenger Arrivals”. Inge Harding‑Barlow talked on “Immigration From Europe through the UK, Germany, Netherlands, 1750-1900. If you did not attend this seminar, you really missed something really interesting. They are extremely well done, and well worth your while attending in the future. For all this information, the price is extremely reasonable. I can not imagine why anyone who is interested in genealogy would not want to attend these seminars. This is copy of the Syllabus that was handed out for the Seminar which includes a lot of the details of the talks that were given.
8. Speaking of the future and just so you wont be too disappointed, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning another Seminar on November 8, 2008. The featured speaker will be Paula Stuart-Warren. Some of the topics that are being considered for this Seminar are: “Lord Preserve Us! A Church Record for Family History Search”, “Railroad records and Railroad History”, “Though they were poor, they have been rich in Records”, “The Three R’s, Reading, Writing, and Research in School Records”, The WPA Era, What it created for Genealogists”, “Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Records”, “Where are those Records they told me to Check?”, “The US Archives, The Nation’s Attic”, and “Midwestern and Plain States level Census Records”. Which of these would you like to hear? When additional information becomes available, I will let you know.
9. Just in case anyone is interested, The San Mateo County Genealogical Society now has 947 CD’s in their library, covering just about any topic that one can imagine. They also have thousands of books and periodicals on genealogy. All these are available to anyone. If you are a member, you can borrow copies to take home with you.
10. As I have also announced in prior meetings, and for those of you who are just dying to get more Genealogical information, the National Genealogical Society will be having their conference in Kansas City, Missouri on May 14 to the 17, 2008. That is next month now. The topic of the conference is “Show Me the Nation’s Records”, which will feature record types from across the country with a variety of topics and workshops. This is the 30th National Genealogical Society Conference in the States and Family History Fair. For more detailed information, go to the website http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/.
11. This month, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about some of the basics that make the Family Tree Maker work, since this is the program that most of us use. Some of the following discussion might be too elementary to some of you, but it may be very informative to others. Basically, for one to have any kind of enjoyment out of any computer program, one must know how it works, how to use it, and what it can do for him. I have talked about some of the details of Family Tree Maker in the past meetings, and I thought it would be appropriate to discuss how to get started so one can enjoy his or her family. If you don’t have some systematic means for storing one’s records, you wont have a chance in finding almost anyone at some future date. Storing one’s ancestors genealogy in a shoe box, just will not cut it.
a. We will begin first in what one must do after he has installed Family Tree Maker into one’s computr, assuming that everyone knows how to install it.
b. After installation, the first thing one sees is the Family Tree home page with a dialogue box on the top left hand corner to give a file name to your family that you are about to create. The title on this Dialogue Box is “New Files”. For a first-time user, there will be nothing typed in the background as shown on this picture. I have written in the name “Henderson” for my family file. The next line asks for the location you want to put this file in your computer. There is a default that is already written in this place, and if it is acceptable, you can just continue on. I have changed the default for my particular case to C:\Data Files\FTWData, which is a series of folders that I had created earlier. To find these folders, just click on the Change… button, and find the folder in the dialogue box that pops up that you wish to install your Family Tree data. When you have finished, click on OK, and the following blank page will pop up. You will note on the top row, which is the Title Bar, the name of the file that you have just created. Sorry for the “2” in the name, but this is the only way I could get a new Henderson file for demonstration without destroying my own Henderson file.
c. To see what you have created, go to the “File” on the top left-hand corner, and click on it, and then click on “Open” in the Menu that drops down. The “Open Family File” dialogue box will open up listing all the family files that you have stored in your “Family Tree Maker” program. You will note that I have several, just pay no attention to them. The file that we just created is titled “Henderson.FTW”, which has an FTW extension after it now. The program added this extension automatically. The computer program also automatically created another file titled “Henderson.FBK”, which is not listed here in this dialogue box, but is hidden. This is the backup file for the Henderson.FTW file in case something drastic happens. Your original file can be restored from this file by clicking on “File” in the Menu Bar, and then clicking on “Restore from Local Backup”. This backup file is updated every time one closes one’s program, so do not ever delete it. If one were to ever delete this file, it would comes back automatically whenever one closes his family tree maker program.
d. You are now ready to enter your family information into your family tree. You will note that the only information you can enter is either your name, your wife’s name, or a child’s name. As soon as you enter one’s name, the rest of the information about the person becomes available. On the sample pages that I am passing around, only the yellow spaces can one fill in something. The next sample that I am passing around is the form that is filled out for myself, my wife, and my children.
e. The picture that shows my family and offspring is called the “Family Page”. You can get a print of this page by clicking on “File” on the Menu Bar, and then clicking on “Print Family View”, to get a print of this page, which looks completely different as what appears on the screen of the computer. However, it has all the information that is on the computer screen.
f. For entering the genealogy information on me or my wife’s parents, one clicks on the bar just above me or my wife’s name which has the name of “Parents of George Lee”, and “Parents of Noma Joy”, over the top of the bar resepecively. By clicking on either one of these bars will bring up another family page which will only show me or my wife’s name as a child. The rest of the information should be filled out to complete the genealogy of one’s parents.
g. For entering the genealogy information on our children, one clicks on the button with the arrow on it just to the left of the child that you want to create a family page for that child. Up will pop a family page showing the child now as a parent, and you must now fill out all the genealogical information for that child, such as spouse, children, etc.
h. These steps can be repeated as long as one has ancestors and grandchildren that one has the genealogical information for.
i. There are several other functions that are available on this family page that one has in order to enhance one’s family tree. I will reserve the explanation for most of these until some later date in order not to drag this out too long. However, I would like to point out the four buttons that appear below each husband and wife. They are the “Edit”, “Spouse”, “Scrapbook”, and “Web Search Resources”, buttons.
j. Under the Edit function one can enter detailed information about various events that occurred throughout one’s career, enter notes that come up periodically, create a biography of the individual, and enter other personal information I will go into detail on this at some future date.
k. Under the spouse function, one can enter if he or she has more than one spouse. The program handles this function for each spouse as a completely separate family, that is there is a separate family page for each spouse.
l. Under the Scrapbook function, one can store photographs and other material that pertain to that particular individual.
m. Under Web Search Sources is one can enter the internet to make a websearch in order gain particular information. This requires one to register in order use this function, but it is free.
n. There are many more functions on the Menu Bar and Tool Bar at the top of the Family Page which will also be covered at some future date. I have discussed some of these functions in the passed meetings. Anyone who wishes to review any of the talks that were given in the past, they are all located on SIR’s Branch One Website
12. Today, I am going to let you hear what the CEO’s of Microsoft and GM think about each other’s product. The title of today’s newscast is “Gates VS GM”.
13. I have placed all of my meeting discussions onto the SIR’s Website in case you would like to refer to some of them. In the Genealogy Group on the Website, scroll down until you see the title “Monthly Genealogy Meetings”. Under this title you will see the dates of our past meetings. Click on any one of these dates and you will see the discussions that we talked about at each of these meetings. I have changed the format at this point a little, and have placed all the Monthly Genealogy Meetings for 2007 into a single folder titled “2007 Genealogy Meetings”. The monthly meetings for 2008 will be shown individually until the end of the year, and they also will be placed in a 2008 folder. This will save a great deal of space and make it much easier to look up the meetings.