Meeting for April 5, 2009

SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

April 7, 2009

109th Meeting

1. Roll Call.

2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, May 5, 2009. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

3. Today, Gordon Lavering will be discussing the book that he has just written and published on the Genealogy of his life. I have taken a quick look at it and it is fantastic piece of workmanship. We will get back to Gordon after our regular business.

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 Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for the this meeting will be Margaret Melaney, who will talk on “Visiting Ancestral Homes”. Have you ever wanted to travel to the places your ancestors lived? Add color to your reports with photos and anecdotes? Discover living relatives, or just get a feel for how your ancestors lived? Come and join the rest of the group for a “how to” session on visiting ancestral homes. The talk will cover preparing for the trip, how to make the most of your visit, what to look for, what you will want to bring back, and the etiquette involved in exchanging information. You will learn how to recognize important local resources, and get some tips on genealogical serendipity. Margaret Melaney gets most of her family history information from strangers she meets in coffee shops, graveyards, libraries, archeological digs, and car repair shops. Come a little early and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.

6. The meeting that was held on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 by the San Mateo County Genealogical Society was a great meeting, and those who didn’t attend missed a great presentation. There was only two of us who attended. Myself and Bob Shoemaker. The speaker for the this meeting was Steve Morse, who talked on “Hodgepodge”. Steve gave a great presentation at the Spring Seminar that was held at the San Mateo County Genealogical Society last year. He updated this presentation about his “One Step Website” that he created, and for which he has received numerous awards. In his other life, he is a computer professional with a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. He is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086, which sparked the PC revolution 25 years ago. This talk covered all the possibilities for retrieving genealogical information that were available on his website, which were many.

7. The San Mateo County Genealogical Society’s Spring Seminar which was presented 3 days ago on Saturday, April 4, 2009, is also now history. The only people of our group who attended was myself, Bob Shoemaker, and Russ Brabec. The title of the Seminar was “The Women In Our Lives - Finding the Records of our Female Ancestors”. If you missed it, you really missed the best seminar on genealogy that I had ever seen. Even my wife enjoyed the show. The Keynote Speaker was Cath Madden Frindle. In addition to the keynote speaker, there was also 5 featured speakers, namely Pamela Dallas, Gayle Simons, Deborah Ostenberg, Janet Brigham Rands, and Rose Mary Kennedy. The topics are “What was Grandma’s Maiden Name”, Marriage, Divorce, and Inheritance”, “Ladies and their Organizations”, “Soldier’s Widows – Marriage & Pensions”, “Women in LDS Databases”, “Women of the West”, “Crossing the Pond - Passengers & Citizens”, and “Land in her own Name – Women Homesteaders”. They had 113 participants at the meeting, so there was a terrific turnout. There will be another great Seminar on October 24 of this year. So mark your calendar so you will be sure to remember it. The speaker will be Karen Clifford, and I will have further details when they become available.

8. Again, 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 this year on May 13 to the 16, 2009. That is next month, and this is the next to the last time you will hear about it.

9. For those who are interested, the National Archives and Records Administration, they have announced their Workshop Schedule for 2009. The workshop that was held on March 20, 2009, is now history. The remaining workshops are:

Date	Time	Topic
April 17, Friday	9:00AM to 1:00 PM	Passenger Arrival & Naturalization Records
May 15, Friday	9:00AM to 1:00 PM	E-VET Records Research
June 12, Friday	9:00AM to 1:00 PM	Military-Part I, Revolutionary War to Civil War
June 26, Friday	9:00AM to 1:00 PM	Military-Part II, Spanish American to Viet-Nam

All workshops will be conducted by Rose Mary Kennedy at NARA-Pacific Region, 1000 Commodore Drive, San Bruno, CA 94066-2350. To register and reserve a space, contact: Rose Mary Kennedy 650-238-3488, or E-Mail her at rosemary.kennedy@nara.gov. The cost is $15.00, payable in advance.

10. There was a great article that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 3, 2009 on a Group that is preserving the Worls’s Documents, and I thought it would be of interest to every on. These special documents are being sent online by Ancestory.com. The author of the article was Julian Guthrie, a Chronicle Staff Writer.

Tens of millions of documents that have been tucked away in libraries and archives, visible in faded print, dusty albums or on microfilm, are in the process of being transcribed by a global community of dedicated genealogists and hobbyists and placed online for the first time.

Ancestry.com, a worldwide leader in genealogy materials, with nearly 1 million paying subscribers, has started the World Archives Project to expand its existing database of about 7 billion historical records. Documents including U.S. naturalization records, slave manifests from 1807 to 1860 and newspaper index cards from England will be accessible on the Web for free.

The company estimates about 5 million documents will be transcribed through the World Archives Project in 2009.

"Our business model has been to invest in digitizing records and creating searchable records online," Ancestry.com's CEO Tim Sullivan said in an interview this week. "What we are now doing with the World Archives Project is inviting the community, which is made up of highly passionate hobbyists, to transcribe the documents."

Photographic images of the records will be available to Ancestry.com's subscribers, who pay from $95 a month to $300 a year for a range of services. The transcribed database will be available to all.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society and author of several books on genealogy, said that access to records including naturalization documents and slave manifests has been limited.

"These records have been available in certain places, but you have to travel to libraries or order the microfilm," said Shown Mills. "To be able to sit at your desktop and access this is phenomenal."

Speaking of the growing popularity of genealogy research sites, Shown Mills added, "Most Americans don't have much interest in history per se, but I do think there is a deep desire in each of us to know who we are and where we come from."

Ancestry.com is based in Provo, Utah, and has a marketing office in San Francisco, saw its revenue climb to $195 million in 2008, an 18 percent increase over 2007. Its subscriber base increased by 10 percent in the same period.

Sullivan, who was CEO of the online dating service Match.com before coming to Ancestry.com in late 2005, doesn't look at other genealogy companies as competitors. He acknowledges that an array of enterprises - from behemoth Google to genealogy upstarts like Footnote.com - are racing to digitize content. Meanwhile, social networking sites such as Facebook are increasingly being used to find and connect with distant relatives.

"Content is king, and there is so much content yet to be digitized," said Sullivan.

Ancestry.com has digitized U.S. census records from 1790 to 1930, allowing a subscriber to type in a name and go to the digital image of an actual census document handwritten decades earlier. The company also has the world's largest online immigration collection and the world's largest online collection of Jewish family history records, with more than 26 million records from 14 countries.

With the newly released World Archives Project, Ancestry.com hopes to harness the power of its community. The approach is similar, Sullivan said, to that of Wikipedia, where articles are written collaboratively by volunteers.

Ancestry.com invests about $10 million a year in document preservation and digitization. It takes millions of hand-written images, photographs the documents, keys the words into a spreadsheet and places the material online.

The World Archives Project, officially released in late March, already has about 6 million documents that have been transcribed by 11,000 volunteers in 65 countries. These documents range from marriage records and slave manifests to naturalization cards. The slave manifests were filed in Louisiana between 1807 and 1860 and detail the transporting of more than 30,000 slaves to the port of New Orleans.

Bay Area resident Anne Dreyfuss, a subscriber to Ancestry.com, has volunteered to transcribe documents for the World Archives Project.

"I've been doing genealogy as a hobby for 25 years, so I thought I would try the transcribing," said Dreyfuss, who lives in Dublin. "I've started out by transcribing Illinois naturalization papers, which include the surname, given name, aliases, birth date and date they came into the country." Dates on the cards range from 1875 to the 1920s.

In her years researching her family's history, Dreyfuss has had many "goosebumpy moments." One such moment was when she received cemetery books from small towns in Switzerland where her husband's family lived.

"I thought this archive project might be fun," she said. "And, I thought it might just help other people find information they've long been looking for."

For information on Ancestry.com's World Archives Projects, go to: www.ancestry.com/worldarchivesproject

11. In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following short article entitled “Dear IRS”.

12. One more that I couldn’t resist, entitled ”Aunt Carol”.

13. Is there any questions or more information that one wishes to bring before us.

14. And now, I will turn the meeting over to Gordon Lavering for his discussion on the book that he has just published.

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.