SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

February 3, 2009

107th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, March 3, 2009, and we will be back in our regular conference room. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

3.           On our meeting next month on March 3, 2009, Russ Brabec will be giving us a slide presentation of his trip that he took last year across the United States looking at historical sites, and seeing his name “Brabec” on a Street Sign. Thanks to Don Brozzo who will furnish us with his projection equipment for the showing of these slides.

4.           Before going any further, I must make a retraction on an report that I made last month regarding the great grand uncle of a United States congressman Harry Reid. From the super-sleuthing that was performed by Master Detective Russ Brabec when he checked out Snopes on the internet, the article was a complete sham. From the Snopes article, it appears the identical article was turned out on several other politicians, namely: Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Ted Stevens, and several others, only the names were changed. It appears someone didn’t like certain politicians and decided to invent a nasty article about them. He might of gotten away with it, if he had changed all the circumstances also. Warning, you can’t believe everything that one reads or sees on the internet.

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

6.           I would like to read an excerpt from the Branch Leaders Guide which is part or SIR’s Bylaws. I will quote from the section entitled “Women and SIR”. So, it is legal to have women attend our Activity Meetings. The Garden Group has been doing this for years, the question is do we want to do that?

7.           The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for the February meeting will be Richard Rands, who will talk on “Organizing Your Stuff”. Being organized is an enormous challenge with today’s fast moving and efficient research methodologies. Keeping on top of the material we accumulate and organize it all in a way that will make it easy to store, track, and access is frustrating. This presentation will offer new ideas and help you develop the skills and methods that will make it possible implement and efficient storage, tracking, and access system for your genealogy stuff. This seems like an important meeting that you should attend.

8.           For those of you who missed the General meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society on Saturday, January 17, 2009, you missed a great meeting. The speaker was John Gleed, who talked on “Databases and Indexes”. John reviewed two major bodies of databases and the indexing projects associated with them. They were Ancestry.com and Pilot. All indexes have flaws, and John showed examples and suggested how they came about. He described the indexing opportunities in both Ancestry and Pilot. John is an outstanding speaker and he has spoken before the group several times. He is extremely popular, and if you missed this meeting, you missed a great opportunity to gain a wealth of knowledge.

9.           As I have reported before, 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 soon. The latest information is that Cañada College Chancellors are currently looking at the proposed contract. The College had recently submitted information about liability insurance coverage and they are working out the details. Maybe Bob Shoemaker has more recent information.

10.      Now that your have regretted not attending the San Mateo County Genealogical Society’s Fall Seminar, you can make up for it by attending the Spring Seminar that will be presented this year on Saturday, April 4, 2009. The title of the Seminar is “The Women In Our Lives - Finding the Records of our Female Ancestors”. It will be presented at the 1^st Presbyterian Church in San Mateo, form 9:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. The Keynote Speaker will be Cath Madden Frindle. I have now received the complete information for the seminar, and I am passing out the new flyers for everyone to sign up and send in their contribution. For the amount of information that one receives from such a seminar, the price is right. For members, it is $25.00, for nonmembers, it is $28.00, and for lunch, it is $8.00 more. You will also receive a SYLLABUS for the show. In addition to the keynote speaker, there will also be 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”. What more could one possibly ask for such a demonstration? So sign up early, or you might be too late. The premises can only handle 100 people. They had 103 participants at the November meeting.

11.      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 next year on May 13 to the 16, 2009. I know that everyone here missed the National Meeting that was held in May of last 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 31^st National Genealogical Society Conference in the States and Family History Fair. The conference will take place in the brand new Raleigh Covnention 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/. For those of you who will be attending or just plain interested, I am passing around the syllabus for the complete conference. Please read it over in complete detail.

12.                       For those who are interested, the National Archives and Records Administration, have announced their Workshop Schedule for 2009.

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.

13.      There is a fairly new site on the internet, or I think it is new, titled “Chronicling America”. It is a site that one can look and print Historical American Newspapers from 1880 to 1910, or gain information about American Newspapers from 1690 to the present day. Chronicling America is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).  This is a print of the “San Francisco Call of Friday, April 1, 1910. The type is very small and difficult to read, but clicking the appropriate buttons, one can zoom in on any details one wishes. The National Digital Newspaper Program is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to provide enhanced access to United States Newspapers. Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, the NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and the U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress and be freely accessible via the Interntet. A national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats. It will also digitize and contribute to the database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership. The two agency partners launched a prototype of this digital resource on March 2007. As of today, the newspapers that are covered from 1880 to 1910 are for the states of California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. So, they have a long way to go in the next 10 years. The internet address for their site is: http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/, so just click on this address and it will bring you right to the site. It seems that is just the beginning of a massive undertaking.

14.      Back to the basics of Genealogy and Family Tree Maker. I thought it would be informative to everyone to understand the basics of trees of one’s descendents and ancestors. There are two major types of trees, which are the “Descendents View Tree”, which is the most common, and the “Pedigree View Tree”. The Descendents View Tree shows the descendents of someone going forward, such as a tree that shows my children, my children’s children, etc. The Pedigree View Tree, which is also called The Ancestor View Tree, shows the ancestors of someone going backwards through the generations, such as my father and mother, my grandfather and grandmother, etc. There are many other forms of trees, but these two are the most common, and the others are just modifications of these two. The word “Pedigree” is more common to dogs, horses, etc., but it has the same significance to humans.

15.      In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following short article entitled “Indian Sales Man”.

16.      One more that I couldn’t resist, entitled ”FERRARI”.

17.      And finally, I would like to read a short but important article entitled “The Nations Nativity Scene”.

18.      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.