SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
October 7, 2008
103rd Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, November 4, 2008. So, everyone mark their calendar.
3. Is there any other Old Business or New Business that we should take care of before moving on?
4. The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, October 15, 2008 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for the October meeting will be David Silver and the title of his talk will be “Basic Techniques for Dating Vintage 19th 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 will be lecturing on the various photographic processes that were used in the 19th century, how researchers today identify them and further strategies for dating them. After the lecture, he will stay for an “Antiques roadshow” style appraisal session to examine and evaluate whatever vintage cameras or photographs members wish to bring. This should be a very interesting meeting, and all are invited. Come early at 7:00 P.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting. 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. There will be no General Meeting of the Society in November because the Society’s Seminar will be given at the same time that the monthly meeting is normally scheduled. Therefore, the October meeting will be the last general meeting of the Society for this year. The Society does not regularly meet in the month of December.
5. 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 College. On July 22, 2008 the following SMCGS members met with Dave Patterson, Reference Librarian at Cañada to begin negotiating a contract. The negotiating team from SMCGS were Jean Ann Caroll, Dick Laughlin, Mel Pratt, Bob Shoemaker, Diane Smelker, and Cath Trindle. This was just a first draft that was presented to the Canada library for them to review. They had targeted September 1st for completion of the contract revisions, which is now past. Maybe Bob Shoemaker can add any further information to this that has come up recently.
6. As I have also reported before, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is planning their fall Seminar on November 15, 2008. This Seminar is now only one month 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”. Her website is www.paulastuartwarren.blogspot.com for those who are interested. They have now finalized the topics on which the speaker 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 25th Avenue and Hacienda Avenue in San Mateo.
7. As I reported for the last several months, and for those of you who are just dying to get more Genealogical information, the National Genealogical Society will be having their conference in Raleigh, North Carolina next year on May 13 to the 16, 2009. I know that everyone here missed the National Meeting that was held in May of this year, so here is your chance to make up for it. There were 1,600 attendees at the meeting last May, so it was considered a very successful conference. There were 50 speakers who presented exceptionally high-quality programs. The topic of the conference for next year is “The Building of a Nation from Roanoke to the West.”. This is the 31st National Genealogical Society Conference in the States and Family History Fair. The conference will take place in the brand new Raleigh Convention Center, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hotel accommodations are in the adjoining Marriott Hotel or nearby at the Sheraton Hotel. For more detailed information, go to the website http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/. Additional information will be announced as it becomes available.
8. For those of you who missed the San Mateo County Genealogical Society Meeting on September 20, 2008, you missed an extremely informative and interesting meeting. I was the only one in our group who attended. The talk, which was given by Jim Faulkinbury, was about United States Naturalization Records. Just to understand the history of how people became citizens in the United States from this country’s independence from Great Britain is extremely interesting saga in itself. Prior to 1820, immigration into the colonies and the early republic amounted to about 400,000 persons. Most of these were British origin. Prior to independence, British immigrants were already citizens of the colonies, and thus they did not create any citizenship documents. Non-British colonists were encouraged, but not required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. In cities, such an allegiance was required for colonist in order to buy land. In the frontier areas, it was largely ignored. The British Statute in 1740 allowed an alien who resided in a colony for at least seven years to be naturalized with all rights of citizenship by swearing an Oath of Allegiance to the Crown before a local magistrate. The oaths were usually just in the form of an entry in the court record naming the persons and the date of their oath. In Philadelphia, immigrants were often taken off of the ships on which they arrived and led to the magistrate to swear the oath at the time of their arrival. From 1776 to 1790, which is after the United States was formed, the states had their own requirements for citizenship. Any person who supported the cause during the Revolution were considered citizens automatically. The first Nauuralization Act was established in 1790. It required two years of residence in the United States and one year in the state of current residence before a “Petition of Naturalization” could be filed. Any Federal court or any local court given jurisdiction by the state, such as a city, county, or state courts could perform naturalizations. In 1795, the residency requirement was increased to five years and the process also required a “Declaration of Intent”, also known as the “First Papers”, to be filed after three years of residency. This change also allowed single women over 21 to apply for their own citizenship. Since women were not allowed to vote at that time, the women did not have any particular reason to have citizenship, unless they wanted to own land. There were several variations made to the naturalization laws during the next 116 years. The courts having jurisdiction could have been at any level until 1906. The amount of information included in the documents was dependent upon the court, therefore there is a wide variation on the amount of information found in these documents. Before 1790, Wives and the children became citizens upon the naturalization of the husband and farther. In 1906, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was established. From this point forward, there was more consistency in the process. Only Federal courts and designated state courts had jurisdiction. The forms that were used were standardized for the amount of information required. In 1922, wives were required to file separately for their citizenship, because of the Amendment to the Constitution that permitted women to vote. There is an abundance of information that can be obtained from all these documents, providing one can find them. Locating pre-1906 records requires knowledge of the area in which the person lived at the time when he would likely have been naturalized and then checked the records for all possible courts of jurisdiction.
9. And now a piece of information about The Family Tree Maker. I had talked several times about the kinship relationships in one’s family, but I had never gone into any detail on the subject, until now. One of the nicest features about The Family Tree Maker is that it is able to break down everyone in your Genealogy program and indicate what kinship that person is to you. I think that most other Genealogy programs will do the same.
a. To begin to list one’s kinship relatives, you first must highlight the person’s name that you wish to find the kinships of, such as your name. On the example that I am passing out, you will notice that my name is highlighted, so that is who the kinships shall be related to.
b. Next, click on the “Reports” button on the Tool Bar at the top, which I have shown on the sheet that I have passed out. Unfortunately, you will note that the Reports button has no title on it, so you will have to memorize what the button means, or push buttons by trial and error until you have pushed the right one. The picture on the button kind of looks like a report.
c. A Menu drops down after clicking on the button, and in this Menu is “Kinship Report”, it is the fourth item down from the top. Click on this item, and up will pop up the Kinships of your highlighted person for everyone that you have stored your computer. This is all done automatically by the computer and it is all up to date. In my case there is 64 pages of my kinships, and I have shown only the first 2 pages for simplification and economy of saving paper.
d. You will note that all the all the names are in alphabetical order for ease in locating names. You will also note that the first dozen or so names have only first names and only 5 stars for a last name. That is because I do not know what their last was, and so I just placed 5 stars for their last name until I find what their last name really is. When I do discover their last names, I just erase the stars and enter the correct name, and it will fall in correct alphabetical order. The correction can not be done on the Kinship page, only on the home page where this individual is located. You can not make any editing of the Kinship page.
e. You will also note that the nature of the kinships are broken down into not only one’s mother, father, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, but also 3rd cousins once, twice, etc., removed, husband of 1st cousin 3 times removed, wife of the 6th great-granduncle, etc. So, the Genealogy program does an excellent and extensive breakdown of one’s kinship and it is well worthwhile to have this knowledge available to you. Try figuring out the kinships of some of your relatives by yourself sometime.
10. I would like to read an extremely important article written by Dr. Robert Jay Rowen which is a subject that we all should be aware of. Dr. Rowen is a practicing MD doctor in Santa Rosa, who also writes a news letter about medicine every month. The title of this article is “Do Cell Phones Really Cause Cancer?”. It is a rather long article, but I feel it is important enough to hear it through.
11. In closing, I would like to read a piece of Naval History, entitled “Little Known Naval History”. This is a true story.
12. I can’t resist telling you just one more joke. This is kind of a political joke, so I hope I don’t offend anyone. The title is “I like a man who knows his parent’s minds!”
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.