Meeting for Autust 1, 2009

SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

August 4, 2009

113th Meeting

1. Roll Call.

2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, September 1, 2009. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

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

4. There will be no meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society in August, and their next meeting will be in September. This meeting will be on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 7:30 P.M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker will be Ron Arons, and the title of his talk will be “Mapping Madness”. In this talk, Ron will be discussing websites that provide historical maps and several online mapping tools. Ron demonstrates how both Microsoft Maps and Google Maps operate. The presentation also covers Microsoft’s Map Cruncher Tool, which mashes two similar maps together. Ron will also briefly cover IBM’s Many Eyes, Muckety.com, and Whitepages.com. Come early at 7:00 P.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting. This should be an extremely interesting meeting. Since the Fall Seminar for the San Mateo County Genealogical Society is going to be held in October, there will be no General Meeting of the Society in October. There will be only one last meeting of the Society after the September meeting, and that will be in November.

5. The meeting that was held on Wednesday, July 18, 2009 by the San Mateo County Genealogical Society was a great meeting, and those who didn’t attend missed a very informative presentation. There was only three of us who attended from our group, who were myself, Bob Shoemaker, and Rick Dusine. The speaker at this meeting was Marcia Holstrom, and she talked on the earliest years of the development of our United States territory, the “West”. At that time it was the Hudson River, then the Cumberland Gap, Ohio, and on to the Mississippi River. The title of her talk was “Let’s explore together this movement of our ancestors from the Atlantic Coast to the Big Muddy”.

6. To bring you up to date on the San Mateo County Genealogical Society contractual agreement with La Cañada College to have their library housed in the library at La Cañada, the Grant Agreement for this move is now signed by both parties. There became a snag in the proceedings in which La Cañada College has decrease the number of book racks that will be available to the Society, which is a serious problem. Discussions are now going on to try and solve this problem.

7. As I have announced previously and that I now have more information, the San Mateo County Genealogical Society’s Fall Seminar will occur on October 24 of this year, at the 1^st Presbyterian Church, 25^th & Hacienda Avenues, in San Mateo. So mark your calendar so you will be sure to remember it. The speaker will be Karen Clifford, who is an accredited Genealogist Professional in Midwestern and Southern States Genealogy, and President/CEO of Genealogy research Associates, Inc. She has been a college curriculum developer and instructor in Genealogy and Computer courses at Monterey Peninsula College. Karen has authored 7 college textbooks on genealogy and published numerous family histories. She is the former President of the Utah Genealogical Association. The seminar will feature four lectures which will be given between 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. There will be a 1-hour break for lunch at 12.00 noon. Registration for members is $25.00 and $28.00 for nonmembers. Lunch is $8.00. I am passing out the Registration Forms for your use in signing up.

8. The Family History Center in Menlo Park has announced a lecture series consisting of Four General Family History Topics which will be discussed at the intermediate level. The meetings will be held on Saturday afternoons from 1:30 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. and will consist of two presentations of 55-60 minutes with a 30 minute break between them during which problems and questions can be discussed with the instructors. All meetings will be in the High Council Chamber of the LDS Church located at 1105 Valparaiso Avenue in Menlo Park. All instructors are Senior Staff Members of the Family History Center. These lectures are open to the general public and are free of charge. Pre-registration is requested in order to guarantee seating. The meetings will be held on May 2, 2009, May 30, 2009, June 27, 2009, July 25, 2009, August 22, 2009, and September 19, 2009. The topics will primarily be on “United Kingdom Family History”. The first four lectures of this series is now history, and there are only two left. For registration and other information, call Tom Fletcher at 650-366-9904. They are currently planning the lectures and speakers for three additional Series on “Writing Your Family History”, “The Three Empires of Greater Germany”, and “United States Migrations”. These lectures are extremely well done and worth while attending. I had passed out copies of the announcements to everyone at our previous meeting.

9. There is also another series of lectures that will be given by the Family History Center which is titled “Introduction to Genealogy”. For those who consider themselves beginners in genealogy, this may be a very useful program to attend. It will be held at the Family History Center in Menlo Park for 8 weeks starting on July 11, 2009, through August 29, 2009, from 1:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M. The lectures are aimed at Beginners to Family History Research, but all are welcome. The subjects that will be covered are “Orientation to Genealogy”, “Beyond the Census”, and “Using Google in Genealogy”. This series is also limited, and if you are interested, call Tom Fletcher 650-353-6616.

10. The Family History Center in Menlo Park now has a website which can be reached on one’s computer by entering the internet address www.mpfhc.org. The site is not very detailed yet, because it is only a few months old. But it appears that it could be a great source of genealogical information in the future. The important information gives the days and the hours in which the Center is open, which has changed throughout the years. They have links to Lecture Series that they will be presenting giving detailed information of what will be covered. A very important link is to a description of how one should get started in his or her Family History, which is a very useful document. I am handing out a copy for everyone’s information. I am also handing out a copy of the Website which comes up on one’s computer, except I left out all the pictures and color to save the cost of reproduction. I would like to take the time to read this document entitled “How Can I Start My Family History”, because I think this is a very important and informative document.

11. For those of you who missed my detailed explanation last month of the Family Tree Maker 2009, I will review a few of the important observations that I had made. I had purchased and installed the program a couple of months ago, and found that it was a major installation which took about two hours to install and bring the data up to date. They have completely revised the past versions, so it is an all new learning process in order to operate the new program. However, there are many similarities, so all is not lost. It is important to note that the new program is installed separately onto one’s computer, and is not a version that overwrites and updates any past version, as it was done in all the former versions. After loading the program, you will end up with two versions of Family Tree Maker, the old version of the program and the new version of the program. You then must download all the data from your old version into the new version, which is not too difficult a task. The instructions for downloading are very straight forward. Remember, that these are two separate programs now and they are not linked together. So, if you make any changes or additions to one, the other one does not record these changes automatically. If you are going to preserve both versions, then you must make the same changes in both in order to keep both versions up to date. I have made a copy of the home page of each of the two versions to show you the big change that has been made. In the old version, both the husband and wife were shown on the same page. In the new version, each has their own separate page along with a picture. All the information on the old version is retained on the new version, plus the pedigree tree of each person is also shown. In order to obtain the home version for my wife, I just click on her name which is just under my name, and the entire home page will switch to her home page. I discussed last month in great detail of the problem with pictures in the new version of Family Tree Maker, which is a problem for those who have their pictures stored in Word, like me. Word picture files have the extension of george.doc as an example of a picture of me. Family Tree Maker does not like files with extensions with .doc, and therefore will not accept them. It therefore requires one to have a separate program for storing picture files that will be linked to The Family Tree Maker program. One can store pictures in any folder, but it will be most convenient if one can look at any picture from one’s file without going through a series of clicking in order to view the picture in the file. For example, one can store jpg pictures in folders in a Microsoft Word program, but Word can not view them. To view the files that one has stored in Word, one must go through and select a program in one’s computer that can read jpg files, which takes some clicking to do so. For example, right click on a jpg file that one has stored in a Word document, which will bring up a Menu that has several options. Go down to “Open With” option which will bring up another Menu that has several options to choose from. Select the option that you know can read the jpg picture and left click on it will bring up the picture. If none of the choices that are given in the Menu will read the jpg picture, go down to the bottom of the Menu and left click on “Choose Program”, which will bring up many more choices, depending on how many programs you have stored in one’s computer. If after all this, you have selected the wrong picture, or you do not like it, you must start all over again. Much nicer if you were in a program that by simply clicking on the file will bring up the picture automatically for you with only one click. This is the point at which I am doing further research on. I will let you know if I am successful.

12. There is an important Financial article that I would like to read to you which was published by The Kiplinger Letter of July 17,2009. Maybe some of you have heard of it. The Kiplinger Letter has been published monthly since the 1930’s, and their predictions of the future had been very accurate. However, they never predicted anything that was of any disastrous consequence in the past, until now. They have been more or less very conservative with predictions with no rash disturbances. The article follows.

13. In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following timely article entitled “What Causes Arthritis”.

14. One more interesting comment that I couldn’t resist, entitled ”Some Clever General Truths”.

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

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. They are found 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 2008 into a single folder titled “2008 Genealogy Meetings”. The monthly meetings for 2009 will be shown individually until the end of the year, and they also will be placed in a 2009 folder. This will save a great deal of space and make it much easier to look up the meetings.