SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

August 5, 2008

101st Meeting

1.     Roll Call.

2.     The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, September 2, 2008.

3.     Our 100^th meeting last month was a great success. There were 7 of us who showed up for celebrating the anniversary of our 100th meeting at the Hokkaido Sea-Food Restaurant. We were very sorry that the rest of our group could not be with us. I think everyone had a great luncheon.

4.     Is there any other Old Business or New Business that we should take care of before moving on?

5.     The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 10:30 A. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. There is no meeting in August. The speaker for the September meeting will be Jim Faulkinbury who will talk on Naturalization Records. Jim is a professional genealogist with over 40 years experience and a specialist in California research. He will explain how to get the most information out of complex, ever-changing, invaluable Naturalization Records. This should be a very interesting meeting, and all are invited. You do not have to be a member to attend the meetings. Try it, you will like it! If you are at all interested in Genealogy, you will enjoy the meetings that are put on by this society.

6.     In case you missed the San Mateo County Genealogical Society meeting that was held on Wednesday, July 19, 2008, you missed a great and interesting meeting. It looks like I and Bob Shoemaker were the only ones from this group who attended. Pamela Bell Dallas was our speaker, and the title of her talk was “Extra! Extra! Your Ancestors Are in the Newspapers”. This presentation covered the History of Newspapers, how one can get access to them, and most interesting how one could get access to the obituaries of most all newspapers from now back to the 1800’s.

Newspapers date back to Roman times when scribes wrote military and government accounts of the day and distributed them to the masses. Eventually, they were recording the happenings in the lives of the common man. The first Italian newspaper is said to be the Notizie Scritte which was first publioshed in 1562. It sold for a small coin called the gazetta. This is the origin of the word “Gazette” which is still associated with newspapers today.

Benjamin Harris, owner of a Boston bookstore and coffeehouse, printed the first newspaper in the United States on September 25, 1690. Unfortunately, he failed to obtain permission from the governor of the commonwealth of Massachusetts and was shut down for good after the first day. The Publick Occurrences, which was the name of the newspaper, had only one issue. America’s first continuously published newspaper, The Boston News-Letter was first published in 1704, and ran for 72 years. There were several early newspapers that were published in the United States such as the Boston Gazette and the Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury which both started in 1719. James Franklin and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin started the New England Courant in Boston on August 7, 1721. This was the first newspaper to be critical of British control in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin later moved to Philadelphia and started the Pennsylvania Gazette. By 1890, there were some eighteen thousand newspapers being published in the United States.

It is interesting to note, that the first colonists that settled in the new world got their only news from newspapers that were published in England and other European countries and which were shipped in on board ships. This was the only contact the early settlers had with the outside world, as to what was going on. Several months late, but better than nothing.

7.     It is interesting to note that the San Mateo County Genealogical Society passed a resolution in their last meeting to actively engage in a contractual agreement with La Cañada College to have their library moved to the library at La Cañada College. This was a great achievement and thrill for everyone, because the group has been working on this move for almost 10 years. The vote was unanimous. There only remains acceptance of the final contract, which we hope will be by the end of this year.

8.     As I have also reported before, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning their fall Seminar on November 8, 2008. The date had to be changed, and it is now November 15, 2008 instead. Please adjust your schedule accordingly. The featured speaker will be Paula Stuart-Warren, who is a nationally known Certified Genealogist and Genealogy Lecturer. Paula is a columnist for Ancestry.com, is a winner of the Distinguished Service Award from the Minnesota Genealogical Society, and the Award of Merit from the Federation of Genealogy Societies. She coauthored the best-selling book “Your Guide to the Family History Library”. Her website is www.paulastuartwarren.blogspot.com for those who are interested. They have now finalized the topics on which the speakers will be speaking and they are: “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”, and “Where are those Records they told me to Check?”. The cost for nonmembers is $30.00 and lunch is $8.00, for a total of $38.00. It is a well worth while event to attend, so I will expect everyone to attend. (Hand out Reservation Forms). I am handing out the appropriate forms for each of you to fill out and mail in, so you will have no excuse for not attending. All the information about the Seminar and where it is to be held is on the back of the form. It will be held at the First Presbyterian Church at 25^th Avenue and Hacienda Avenue in San Mateo.

9.     As I had announced last month, the National Archives and Records Administration has announced their Workshop Schedule for the National Archives Pacific Region at San Bruno, California.  There is only one workshops remaining for the rest of the year, which is this Friday:

10.                        I thought it would be appropriate at this time to discuss a little about the Spell Checker that is on everyone’s computer.

a.     First, we will discuss the Spell Checker on one’s E-Mail, since this will be a shorter discussion than that which is in Word. Also since everyone uses E-Mail it is an important topic.

b.     It is very appropriate for one to check their spelling after one has composed his message that he is to going send by E-Mail to someone. It is not only embarrassing to the sender when he finds out that an error was committed, but it also signals a bit of carelessness on the part of the sender to the recipient. It may only be a typo, but it is kind of important that the spelling be correct in order to avoid all assumptions. An errorless report reflects a conscientious and dignified presentation regardless of how simple it was. Almost all errors are just simple typo’s.

c.     Checking the spelling is a very simple maneuver in E‑Mail. One should check for errors only after he has completed the message. If you check the message before one finishes, you will not have the rest of the message checked, unless you check it again.

d.     In the message part of the E-Mail I have intentionally created a misspelled word for WORKS as WERKS, which is all in upper case letters and which the Spell Checker picked up and highlighted.

e.     On the E-Mail dialogue box which you have installed for your E-Mail, click on “Tools” in the Menu Bar, which will drop down a Menu. In this Menu, click on “Spelling”, which will bring up a dialogue box which is titled “Spelling”. In the background, the word that is of concern is highlighted. In the bottom window of the dialogue box, it has several suggestions at what the word should be. The computer has selected on of the options as to what it might be, and placed it in the small widow above the suggestions titled “Change To”. You can either accept this suggestion, choose another of the suggestions below by clicking on it, or typing in the word you want in the “Change To” box. You have several choice buttons on the right-hand side. By pressing the “Ignore Button”, will accept the word that you have written without changing anything. By pressing the “Change Button”, will change the word in the E-Mail document to the word that is now in the “Change To” box. The “Ignore All” button can be pressed to ignore all those cases where the word that is of concern appears more than once in the document. This will save one the time from clicking “Ignore” for each occurrence. The “Change All” button is pressed to change all those cases where the word that is of concern appears more than once in the document. This step will also save one the time from clicking “Change” for each occurrence.

f.       There is a large dictionary in E-Mail Library that stores most all the common words that are used by the English Language. However, it is limited. One can store a word that is not in the dictionary by pressing the “Add Button”. You will notice that the Spell Checker did not highlight the word “George”. That is because I have stored “George” in the dictionary. If a word is used quite often, the system will usually store the word automatically for you.

g.     And now to “Spell Checker” as it is used in Word. All Spell Checkers operate very similarly, however they are all somewhat different. In Word, Spell Checker works automatically, providing that you have set it up to check automatically, which is usually that way by default. This saves one the trouble of clicking on all kinds of Menu’s and Dialogue Boxes to see if you have misspelled a word, like in one’s E-Mail. Word will underline the word that is of concern with a wavy red-line. This way, one can correct the misspelled words as one types, which is very convenient. Word will also underline a word or group of words with a wavy green-line which looks like it is grammatically incorrect, providing the program is set up so that it will do this. There are several options that one has on how one wishes the Spell Checker to check one’s documents.

h.     You will note that the same text that I used in the example that I used for E-Mail I have placed in Word, the misspelled word that I used “Werks” is not all in capitals as it was in the E‑Mail. That’s because Word accepts words that are in all capital letters as some kind of acronym or title, so it didn’t highlight it as misspelled word. Therefore, I typed as an ordinary word, and Spell Check caught it.

i.       Now that the incorrect word is underlined, what do you do about it. If any word comes up underlined in red, it is assumed that Spell Checker considers the word as being misspelled. Most of the time you would recognized the misspelling, and you would just correct it and go on typing. If you do not recognize what is wrong, right click on the misspelled word and a Menu will pop up. The top part of the Menu will give several choices as to how the word that is underlined in red possibly should be spelled. By clicking on the word on the Menu that is correct will automatically substitute the corrected word for the misspelled word. The Menu also gives you several other choices, such as Ignore All, Auto Correct, and Spelling. Clicking on Spelling will bring up another dialogue box which we will cover later on this discussion.

j.       There are several settings that one can use for Spell Checker in Word. They are found by clicking on “Tools” on the Menu bar, and then clicking on “Options”. On the Options Dialogue Box that pops up, click on the “Spelling & Grammar” tab, and up will pop a dialogue box for Spelling & Grammar.

k.    Under the Spelling list, the first one is “Check spelling as you type”. This comes checked as default, and it is highly recommended to leave this box  checked. By unchecking this box does not mean that you cannot spell check your work, it just has to be done by other means. The next item is “Hide spelling errors in this document”, which is unchecked by default, and his highly recommended to leave it unchecked. I think one would want to see any errors in spelling as you type. The next item is “Always suggest corrections”, which is also checked by default, and is probably a good idea to leave it checked, it will save a lot of time sometimes. The next item is “Suggest from main dictionary only”, which is comes unchecked by default, and is probably wise just to leave it unchecked. There is probably only one dictionary in your computer anyway, so the item is superfluous. One can create more dictionaries in one’s computer for his own particular purpose if one wishes, such as someone who often uses foreign words in his text. The next item is “Ignore words in UPPERCASE”, which is probably wise to leave checked. This is why Spell Checker did not catch my WERKS item. The next item is “Ignore words with numbers”, which is checked by default, and is optional whether to leave it that way. If the text you are writing has a lot of combinations of numbers and letters, then it might be a good idea to uncheck this item. The last item in the spelling list us “Ignore Internet and file addresses”, which also comes checked as a default. This is probably also wise to leave it as checked, unless your text has a lot of internet and file addresses which you would like to have checked. If you do, then you must have these addresses in your dictionary, otherwise you will be bugged to death every time you type one in.

l.       The list on the bottom is in regards to your grammar. There are only two that are checked, which are “Check grammar as you type”, and “Check grammar with spelling”, which come checked as default. The other two which are “Hide grammatical errors in this document” and “Show readability statistics”. All four of these come this way by default, and it is probably wise to let remain this way. When selected differently, it is probably only useful by those who have very fancy or sophisticated documents, which will save them a lot of time.

m.  Now in Word there is another Spell Checker that you should know about, in case you wish to give a thorough check for grammar and spelling, or you have a especially-long document. This is found by clicking on “Tools” on the Menu Bar, and then clicking on “Spelling & Grammar”. This will bring up dialogue box entitled “Spelling & Grammar”, which is a different dialogue box than what we have been talking about. It will take a little while to get use to this box, but if you are dealing with long documents, this dialogue box is very useful. This is the same dialogue box that will open when you right click on the misspelled word and then click on “Spelling” in the Menu that pops up, that I talked about earlier.

n.     This program will proceed through one’s document highlighting one word or portion of a sentence at a time for one to look at to see what is suppose to be wrong. If it is a word that it is highlighted, it will give recommendations for the correct word. If the word is not highlighted in the Suggestion box, then click on the correct one. By clicking on the “Change” button, the word will be automatically corrected and proceed to the next word. If you feel that the word is correctly spelled, then click on the “Ignore Once” button, and it will be ignored. If you want all future occurrences of this word to be ignored, then just click on the “Ignore All” button, and all occurrences of this word will be ignored in this document. All changes or acceptances to words will only apply to this document and to no other document or file. You may also add this word that is highlighted to the dictionary that word uses for spell checking, by clicking on the “Add to Dictionary” button.

o.     Is there any questions?

11.                        I thought it would be interesting if I read the following short article to you regarding the present-day thinking. It is titled “London Times Obituary of the late Mr. Common Sense”

12.                        I would also like to read the article of a true story regarding the first person to set foot on the moon. You all probably remember this event, but this is a new twist. The title is “True Story”, and the story is really true.

13.                        And finally, I would like to end the meeting with this article entitled “Dead Donkey”.

14. 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.