SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
May 6, 2008
98th Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, June 3, 2008. It will be our 99th Meeting.
3. Is there any other Old Business or New Business that we should take care of?
4. The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 10:30 A. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Everyone is invited. Rose Mary Kennedy, a genealogy specialist a the National Archives in San Bruno, will give a presentation on Federal Land Records. California is a Federal Land State, and this talk will emphasize the types of records that are available at the National Archives. These records might include case files, township track books, survey plats, and certificates for homesteads and mineral lands.
5. The San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning another Seminar on November 8, 2008. 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. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 this month now, and this will be the last time you will be hearing about it. 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/.
8. An interesting article on the Dick Eastman’s website entitled “Americans Lack Family History Knowledge”. It seems that despite the popularity of genealogical research in this country, many Americans know little of their family background. The statistics quoted in the article are the results of a survey commissioned by Ancestry.com. Among the things that were discovered from the survey are:
a. One third of Americans cannot name any of their great-grandparents.
b. Six out of 10 Americans do not know both of the grandmother’s maiden names.
c. 22% of Americans do not know what either of their grandfathers did for a living.
d. 27% of Americans do not know where their family lived before they came to America.
On the positive side:
The survey reports that 83% of 18-34 year-olds are interested in learning their family history while 77% or 35-54 year-olds and 73% of those over 55 are interested in the subject.
It is promising to see that a large percentage of young people expressed an interest in learning about their family history. But do they have any idea how to begin genealogical research? It is here that Genealogical Societies can fill the void. Eastman suggests that genealogists in this country need to start spreading the word. In our casual conversations with non-genealogists, we might ask a few questions:
a. Where does your family come from?
b. What did your grandparents do for a living?
c. How about your great grandparents.
d. Are there physical characteristics that run in your family?
e. Can you remember any family stories that were told to you? Do you believe those stories are accurate?
f. Did your family have any memorable holiday or other traditions that were passed down from previous generations
I think some of these thoughts could be used in creating our own genealogy.
9. Rick Dusine brought to our attention last month a website that has a huge amount of free information and software that one can download from the internet. The Website for those of you who are interested is http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2260070,00.asp. This is a website of PC Magazine, and it is loaded with information about computers and related topics. Once you get to the site, you can spend the rest of your life reading through it, there is so much to see. It takes a bit of clicking to finally get to the “The Best Free Software”, some of the software you may already have. I would be very careful about downloading too much of the free software, because it may not be compatible with one’s computer or may slow down the operation of one’s computer. Material that one can obtain is Antispyware Software, Antivirus Software, Backup Software, Media Centers, Mulit-Function printers, Photo Printers, Computer & Consule Gaming, Digital Camcorders, Plasma Displays, Projectors, Robots, Digital Imaging Software, Scanners, DVD Authoring Software, Scanners, Security Software, External Hard Drives, Firefox, Flash Drives, Speakers, High-Definition Players, Video Editing Software, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Wireless Networking, and much more.
10. There is a new Family History feature on the internet which I thought you would be interested in. It is called Geni. The internet connection is http://www.geni.com/treads. It is a similar feature to what Family Tree Maker use to have before they start charging money to enter their Website. I have just discovered it and it is a little difficult to learn how to use it. The first thing that I learned it will not take any pictures that are created in Microsoft Word. You must have pictures that are created with the jpg extension. It is a genealogy sharing program which has several protection characteristics. It is suppose to be a way that one can contact and find their ancestors. It dose not seem to have a large participation yet, but it might. One good feature is that there is no connection to Ancestory.com. Yet!
11. I thought it would be of interest to every one to see what one can do in putting together a biography of one of his family members. The following biography of John C. Alley was but together by research that was done by myself and my cousin John Morse. This is story about the life of John C. Alley who is my first cousin 4 times removed:
John C. Alley was born in 1800 in Missouri. He was the second son of Thomas V. Alley, Sr. and Catherine Baker. John had one brother who preceded him, who was Thomas V. Alley, Jr. who was born in 1798. John had two brothers who were born after him, who were William A. Alley who was born in 1801, and Abraham Alley who was born in 1803. John also had a sister, Cynthia Alley, who was born after him and who was born in 1805.
John’s father, Thomas V. Alley, Sr. had another son, Rawson Alley who was born in 1793, and who was John’s half-brother. Thomas V. Alley’s first wife died soon after Rawson was born, and Thomas V. Alley, Sr. married Catherine Baker on April 13, 1777.
The Alley family was of French Huguenot descent, descending from three brothers who were named Allees and who immigrated to the American colonies in 1739 and 1752.
Until 1821, Spain had made no attempt to settle Texas. All her efforts had been directed towards missionary work for the Indians, who already inhabited the land. In 1821, Moses Austin received permission from the Spanish Government to bring 300 families to Texas to establish a colony. Moses Austin died before he could fulfill his contract, but his son, Stephen F. Austin, was granted his father's commission.
This group was recruited by Stephen Austin in about 1820 to go to Texas as part of what is referred to as Austin's “The Old Three Hundred Colony”. The group, along with John’s brother William, lived in the Potosi, Missouri area (where the Austin's had their lead mines), but also in Jefferson City, Missouri, where Stephen F. Austin was serving on the Missouri state legislature. They were given land grants of 4½ leagues in what are now the counties of Colorado, Fayette, Jackson, Lauaca, and Brazoria. They made their home in what is now Alleyton, Texas.
John C. Alley and his brothers, Thomas V. Alley, Jr. and Abraham Alley, immigrated to Texas in the spring of 1822, from their home at St. Geneivieve, Missouri, where they had been neighbors and friends of the Stephen F. Austin family. At New Orleans they embarked on the schooner "James Lawrence" which was bound for the mouth of the Colorado River. The Alleys debarked on the west end of Galveston Island, before reaching the mouth of the Colorado River.
For the remainder of the trip they proceeded on foot to Fort Settlement on the Brazos River and then to the Atascocito Crossing on the Colorado River. They settled on the East side of the river, and joined John's elder half-brother, Rawson Alley, who had come earlier and was already in Austin's colony. Rawson Alley served as Austin’s surveyor and arrived in Colorado County in 1821. In the winter of 1824, John’s other brother, William Alley, joined them. At that time, they were all young single men.
Anglo-American immigration into Texas began in earnest in 1823 with the opening of Austin’s first colony. New arrivals continued to accept Mexican citizenship and cheap land for more than ten years, up to the Texan declaration of independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836.
According to the actual records, John C. Alley is said to have been the very first settler who was granted land in the Austin Colony which was later named Fayette County, Texas.
In the winter of 1823, John C. Alley, John Clark, and Loy were rowing up the Colorado River in a canoe, when they were attacked by the Karankawa Indians near the mouth of Skull Creek. On February 23, 1823, John C. Alley and Loy were killed. John Clark was seriously wounded, but managed to escape, and after three days, he arrived back at the Atascocito Crossing on the Colorado River.
All of this material was put together from bits and pieces of many segments of information that was retrieved from many documents. After putting it all together, it made a good story of one of my family members. The Alleys were related to me on my mother’s side, whose maiden name was Eulalia Catherine Alley.
12. I thought we would take a break from talking about the Family Tree Maker for a while, so we don’t get too bored hearing about all the technical aspects of how it works. We will come back to it in our future meetings.
13. Today I am going to read an old well-known poem, which some of you may have heard before, but it gives one and idea how this genealogy can really get confused. It is titled “I’m My Own Grandpa”.
14. Since this was such a short note, I thought I would read short axiom which is of most important to us all, entitled “Five Rules for Men to Follow to a Happy Life”.
15. 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.