SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

December 1, 2009

117th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, January 5, 2010. So, everyone please mark their calendar. Today is the last meeting that will be held on these premises. Starting next month, our meetings will be held at 1300 S. El Camino Real, which is a few blocks north from where we are meeting now. The day and time of our meetings will remain the same.

3.           The new location will still be run by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, we will still be taken good care of. There is parking in back of the building which can be entered from either of the two side streets from El Camino Real. The side streets are Madison Ave. and Harrison Ave. If you are approaching the building from the North on El Camino, then you can just pull into either of these streets. However, if you are approaching the premises from the South, I would strongly advise entering these streets from a cross street that is further West of El Camino Real, otherwise you must make a left-hand turn on El Camino Real and there is no Stop Light at this intersection. Not a very safe condition. There is also parking under the building, and street parking. I would like to read a special announcement that the Foundation has issued regarding this move.

4.           Today is the election of new Officers for this group for the year 2010. We need a Chairman, an Assistant Chairman, and a Secretary and Treasurer. The floor is now open for nominations.

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

6.           The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Wednesday, January 20, 2009 at 7:30 P.M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation at there new location. I do not have any of the details as to who the speaker will be yet, but I will get the details for our next meeting in January. Come early at 7:00 P.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting. I also do not know where they will be meeting yet, since Silicon Valley Community Foundation is moving. There is no meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogy Society in December.

7.           The meeting that was held on Saturday, November 21, 2009 by the San Mateo County Genealogical Society was a great meeting, and those who didn’t attend missed a very informative presentation. I was the only one of this group who attended. The speaker at this meeting was Ron Arons, and the title of his talk was “Mapping Madness”. In this talk, Ron discussed websites that provide historical maps and several online mapping tools. Ron demonstrated how both Microsoft Maps and Google Maps operate. The presentation also covered Microsoft’s Map Cruncher Tool, which mashes two similar maps together. Ron also briefly covered IBM’s Many Eyes, Muckety.com, and Whitepages.com. Ron passed out copies of over 20 web sites where one can obtain excellent maps of almost any place on earth. He showed examples of most of these sites, what they looked like, and how one could use them in their genealogical research. For street maps and locating places on maps, he favored either Microsoft or Google. Both were very good, and each had something the other did not have. He was quite thrilled with Microsoft’s Map Cruncher, but I did not think it was too great. It will probably get better. The maps that are available are quite extensive, and one can get copies of ancient maps that reach back for several hundred years. Ron compared a map of place on earth of about 100 years ago, with a map of the present day of the same place. That was extremely interesting. What was somewhat interesting, was one of Ron’s relatives who lived on a street in a city of about 100 years ago, did not show up on the present day maps. So it took an old map to find where his relative once lived. The original street was abandoned or had its name changed.

8.           I spent several hours reviewing Ron Aron’s map sources, and found that it is not as easy as one might think for finding the maps one would like to locate. However the present-day street maps are relatively easy to find, as everyone already knows. I did finally locate a view of San Francisco which was taken in 1860, which took quite a bit of time to be able to get the picture into a program that I could blow up. As usual, the picture that I found on the internet of San Francisco was in jpg format, and I was not able to blow the picture up so that I could print it on a single sheet of paper. I could not insert the picture into Microscope Word, which I could usually do with jpg pictures. Why this is so, who knows. The insert function would not work. So, I was able to insert the picture into one of the programs in my computer that accepted jpg pictures, and with some horsing around, I was able to get the picture into Microscope Word, where I could expand and work with it. It sure looks like an excellent source of information, except it looks like they have a long ways to go.

9.           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 books and supplies in the Library are now in the process of moving to their new location. The new Library will be open to patrons at La Cañada College in early or mid-January of 2010. Maybe Bob Shoemaker knows more about this.

10.      There is an important upcoming Open House which will be cosponsored by the San Mateo County Geological Society and the Menlo Park Family History Center on Saturday, February 27, 2010. The Open House Lectures are free to the public, and they have drawn more than 250 attendees in the past years. So, they are very popular. There will be two Keynote Speakers and thirty-five half-hour lectures on a wide variety of genealogy topics. Suzanne Russo Adams of Ancestry.com has agreed to come to the Bay Area from Provo, Utah, and give a talk as one of the speakers. She was recently a featured speaker at the Southern California Genealogy Society Annual Jamboree. Her talk title was “What’s New at Ancestry.com”. I will report more information on this Open House when it becomes available. It sounds like a very interesting event and surely a must see opportunity for anyone.

11.      About the world’s economy. I thought you would be interested in hearing about the tallest 20 buildings in the world that have been put on hold because of the world’s economic slump.

12.      If this wasn’t bad enough, I would like to read part of an article that was published last September entitled “Conspicuous Consumption transformed into Termerity and Thrift”

13.      In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following article entitled “Husband Down”.

14.      One more interesting story that I couldn’t resist, entitled ”The Barber of Seville”.

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.