SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
February 5, 2008
95th Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, March 4, 2008.
3. This is the day for our mandatory assessment of $5.00 is due for the year of 2008. Are we all still in favor of such an assessment?
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, February 20, 2008 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Everyone is invited. Cath Madden will be giving a talk on “Building a House history.” Every occupant leaves a mark on a house and every house leaves a mark on every occupant. Who lived in your house. Cath will explore ways to uncover the secrets of a house by working backwards using online resources and Assessor’s records and working forward using city planning records, legal issues and maps. Please note 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.
6. If any of you did not attend the San Mateo County Genealogy meeting on Saturday, January 20, 2008, you missed a great meeting. There were three of us from our group who attended. The topic, in case you have forgotten, was “English Genealogy on the Internet – What’s Hot and What’s Not!”. It was a great demonstration of what is out there on the internet on tracing one’s English roots by means of the internet. The talk could also apply to almost any nationality other than English. Cath gave out flyers giving a list of several places on the internet where such information could be obtained. Pass out copies of these flyers. Cath has found places where one can obtain Civil Registrations, Cemetery Records, Wills, Military Records, British Army WWI Service Records, WWI Campaign medals, and several others. Some of these sites charge fees, such as ancestry.com, but there are many of them that are free. Check them out, and let us know if you have any success.
7. As I have announced for several months now, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning a Spring Seminar on March 29, 2008 (Saturday), from 9:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M., that is next month now. Registration begins at 8:15 A.M. The Seminar will be held at First Presbyterian Church at 25th and Hacienda in San Mateo. I will announce this Seminar one more time in our meeting in March. The Keynote speaker will be Steve Morse, who will talk on “Your Immigrant Ancestors”. There will be five other speakers who will also be talking on the same subject. Pass out copies of the Seminar Announcement. The list of the talks are on the rear of the Announcement. The form for registration is on the bottom of the front page. Fill it out and mail it along with your check to Patric Gilbride, who’s address is on the form. Make check payable to SMCGS Seminar. Mark this date on your calendar. So in case you have regretted not attending these Seminars in the past, here is your chance to make up for it. They are extremely well done, and well worth your while attending.
8. Just so you wont get bored, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning another Seminar in the Fall of 2008. No date has been officially been set yet, and further information about the event will be forthcoming.
9. 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. 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/.
10. I thought it would be appropriate at this time that I read the Rules and Regulations of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation for the use of these conference rooms, so that everyone would understand what we can do and cannot do. I had not read these rules to you before, so I thought you should all know and understand what we must live with. I will only do this about once every two years or so, so that everyone wont get bored to death.
11. Russ Brabec has run across an interesting article on the internet which I thought would be interesting to everyone. It states as follows:
The New York Times has made a large section of its online archives available to the public. Articles dated from 1851-1923 and from the past 20 years are free and available to download. Articles published between 1923-1986 are available for a fee. Just go to New York Times website, enter your search terms and define the years for the archive. Stories can be downloaded to your computer as PDF documents. Try looking up names of ships that your ancestors may have traveled on, and there may be an interesting story about the ship or the actual journey itself.
12. I thought it might be of interest to everyone that one of my cousins has published a book on Joel Ricks and His Family which is my ancestors on my wife’s side. The entire works was compiled by Carma Muir Golding Cheminant, which took many years of personal research obtaining information from many relatives who were cooperative, and covered Six Generations. It is a beautiful piece of work that was done by Carma, and it was published by Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The book that I have brought along is Volume II of two volumes, and it cost me $50.00 for the set of two volumes, which is not a bad price. My wife and my picture are on page 89 of Volume II. In the picture of Mildred Ricks and Norma, who is my wife, Mildred Ricks is Norma’s mother, who is an inline descendent of Joel Ricks. This is a beautiful example of what can be done with one’s genealogical research. So get busy everyone.
13. Since this is the first meeting of the year, and it is time for the distribution of the new Rosters for 2008, I thought it would be of interest to everyone to see some of the headaches that one goes through putting something like this together. It might also be of interest to everyone to see how this thing is put together, as well as how Microsoft Word works for making such a product, or maybe it is better put as how Microsoft fails to do what one wants it to do.
a. You will note that the listings of Officers, Directors, and Charirmen at the beginning of the Roster were completely changed from last year’s, or 2007 Edition, of the Roster. I have included the telephone numbers and E-Mails of all the Officers, Directros, and Chairmen along with their names, which was not done in previous versions of the Roster. This took a complete reformatting of the pages in order to get the thing to work, which took several months of painful and backbreaking effort.
b. Now, the back of the book section of the Roster which gives informative information about our SIR’s organization needs to be changed in order to be better descriptive.
c. You will note that at the top of each page there is a title, or header, which describes what is on that page. The way this header was made was as part of the entire page. So if one were to change or add something to the page, and the bottom portion of the page would have to be placed on the top of the next page in order to keep the amount of room that is permitted on the page to be constant. When this happens, the portion that is moved to the next page is place over the top of the header on the next page, instead of below the header like one would like. This also means that a portion of the bottom of the next page is moved above the header on the next page, etc., throughout the rest of the document. This meant a headache of adjustments, by putting the header back on top of the page where it belongs on all the pages. Any more adjustments like this would cause the same bunch of headaches, umpteen times more.
d. So, how do you overcome this? Not too difficult. Just create a header for each page by using Word’s Header command. To create a Header, click “View” on the Menu Bar, and then click on “Header and Footer” on the Menu that pops up. This will bring up a box at the top of the page where one can enter the name of the header one likes. Then click on “Close” on the dialogue box that comes along with the header box.
e. So far so good. However, this gives the same header for every page in the portion of the book that one is writing. This is not what one wants. One would like to have a different header for different pages of the book. Now one can use a different header for the first page and a different header for the remaining pages. This is done by clicking on “File” on the Menu Bar, and clicking on “Page Setup”. This will bring up a Dialogue Box with several alternatives. Click on the “Layout” tab, which brings up another Dialogue Box, and then click on the small box on the left of “Different Front Page” so that there is a check mark in it.
f. Now you have a header for the first page and one can now make a different header for the next page. However, the header that one makes for the next page will be the same header for every page thereafter. You can only have a combination of two possibility of headers, which are a different first page, and the same header for all other pages after the first page. This isn’t any good either.
g. Now what? No problem. If one wants to make separate headers for each page or any combination of this, one must section each page. This done by placing the curser at the top and left-hand side of each page, and click on “Insert” in the Menu Bar, and then click on “Break” in the Dialogue Box that pops up. In the Dialogue Box, click on “Continuous” under the “Section Break Types”. This procedure must be done for every page of the section of the book one is creating.
h. Now one can go ahead and place whatever header one wishes at the top of each page. Even though some pages have the same header, one must do it for each page.
i. Now, the last thing that one must do to complete this operation is to page the document. As if all was not bad enough, the document will not page, because each page belongs to a different section, it will have a different format and therefore will not page.
j. OK, you will overcome this by paging each page individually, which can be done. The only trouble with this is that there is no way one can format the page numbers that you have assigned. Such as the page numbers in the Roster are Bold Face integers and have a dash on each side of the number. There is no way one can change this characteristic.
k. So all of the above must be abandoned, but the process is not lost. It is just more work and effort to accomplish what one wants. To overcome all these problems and complete the task that one wants the pages to appear, one must handle each page, or group of pages that have the same header, as individual documents. So I had to divide the entire roster into 14 different sections in order that I can page each section continuously. Now all that I have to do is to make sure that I start paging the next section throughout the entire document as the next page after the section before, or I will mess up the whole roster. It will almost all have to be by hand.
14. On the political situation, I received the following statistical information from John Young, and I thought you would all be interested. The title of it is “Think-This Could Happen!
15. This is now election time. So, I would like to relate to you my favorite joke on elections. The title of it is “The Death of a Senator”.
16. 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.