SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

November 4, 2008

104th Meeting

1.    Roll Call.

2.    The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, December 2, 2008. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

3.    As an advanced notice, our meeting for February 3, 2009, will be held in room 300 on the third floor of the main building, instead of this room which we usually meet. Our normal room will be occupied by the management of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, who has priority over the use of these rooms. I will continue to remind everyone in the coming months, so you wont forget. I will also post a sign out front for those who have forgotten. At least this is the way it stands now, everything may change, it has before.

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

5.    There is no regular meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society for the month of November, 2008. Instead, they will be having their fall Seminar on November 15, 2008, which was the normal date for their regular meeting. One last time, this Seminar is now this month, and it is only a few days away. 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”. The topics on which the speaker will be speaking 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. Did anyone fail to get a reservation form, or loose it?

6.    In regards to the San Mateo County Genealogical Society contractual agreement with La Cañada College to have their library housed in the library at La Cañada Negotiations are still slowly progressing. The outlook is still very positive, and they hope for some final decision about the first of next year.

7.    For those of you who missed the San Mateo County Genealogical Society Meeting on October 15, 2008, you missed an extremely informative and interesting meeting. There was the only two in our group who attended. The talk, which was given by David Silver which was titled “Basic Techniques for Dating Vintage 19^th Century Photographs”. David Silver is a noted collector, writer, and lecturer on the history of photography, as well as president of the International Photographic Historical Organization. He talked on the various photographic processes that were used in the 19^th Century, how researchers today identify them, and further strategies for dating them. If you missed this meeting, you missed a very interesting an very important meeting about photography. He had a display of 19^th Century photographs and cameras that were absolutely fantastic.

To begin, the first successful popular from of photograph was invented by Louis Daguerre of France in 1839, which was called the daguerreotype. It consisted of a thin sheet of copper that was plated with a highly-polished layer of silver. The surface was effectively a mirror. However, the image was so delicate that it had to be protected in a brass bound packet and hermetically sealed under a piece of glass. The image must never be cleaned or removed from the packet, or the image will be ruined.

 The next photograph was invented a little later by Sir Henry Fox Talbot of England, which was called the Calotype or Talbotype. It consisted of a thin piece of paper impregnated with the appropriate photochemicals to render it sensitive to light. When it exposed to light within a camera, it creates a negative image from which unlimited positive prints on similar paper could be made. This was the beginning of our traditional “positive-negative” method for making photographs.

There were several more methods that were developed before George Eastman revolutionized the entire world of photography in 1888 with the first successful camera that was specifically designed to take roll film. The camera came already loaded with enough flexible film to take 100 pictures, and it was done by just mailing the entire camera back to the factory for the images to be processed. It was returned to you with the camera reloaded with another 100 shots, along with your pictures. The Eastman Kodak catch phrase at that time was, “You press the button, and we do the rest”.

And so today, this method is slowly disappearing as digital cameras are taking over.

8.    In the process of researching one’s Surname, one can come up with very interesting pieces of history. I would like to read an article form the An Canach, which is the Henderson newsletter, which wrote a splendid article about the Surname Henderson.

9.    Today, I would like to talk discuss some of the most important Keyboard shortcuts that one has on his or her computer. One should become very familiar with these shortcuts for faster more useful control of one’s computer. They are as follows”

a.    <Ctrl>+S – Save the current Document.

b.    <Ctrl>+O – Open a new Document.

c.     <Ctrl>+Z – Undo the last thing you did.

d.    <Ctrl>+Y – Undo the last Undo.

e.     <Ctrl>+A – Select the entire current Document.

f.      <Çtrl>+ X –Delete the selection and move it to the clipboard.

g.    <Ctrl>+C – Copy the selection to the clipboard.

h.    <Ctrl>+V –Past the clipboard’s contents into the current program.

i.       <Ctrl>+P – Open the print Dialogue Box.

j.       <Ctrl>+I – Turn Italics on or off.

k.    <Ctrl>+B – Turn Bold on or off.

l.       <Ctrl>+U – Turn underline on or off.

m. <Ctrl>+F or <F3> -- Launch a program’s search or find tool.

n.    <Ctrl>+<Home> -- To move the cursor to the beginning of the document.

o.    <Home> To move the cursor to the beginning of the line.

p.    <Ctrl> + <End> -- To move the cursor to the end of the document.

q.    <End> -- To move the cursor to the end of the line.

r.      Ctrl>+<Tab> -- To switch between open windows.

10.                       I would like to read this interesting article on “Functional Literacy”, which was written by Richard Maybury a well-known economist. It is titled “A colossal need for Help”.

11.                       In closing, I have the following piece of very important information. The title is “The Biker and the Lion”.

12.                       One more last remark before completely closing, entitled “Men Versus Women at the ATM”. A very important phenomenon.

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.