SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

January 6, 2009

106th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, February 3, 2009. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

3.           Again and one last time, I would like to remind everyone that our meeting for February 3, 2009, will be held in room 300 on the third floor of the main building, instead of this room which we usually meet. Our normal room will be occupied by the management of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, who has priority over the use of these rooms. I will post a sign out front for those who have forgotten. At least this is the way it stands now, everything may change, it has before.

4.           On our meeting on March 3, 2009, Russ Brabec will be giving us a slide presentation of his trip that he took last year. I have scheduled it for March instead of February, because I don’t know whether our room for February has a screen setup like we have in these conference rooms that we usually use. Thanks to Don Brozzo who will furnish us with his projection equipment for the showing of these slides.

5.           Today we have a brand new set of officers for the year 2009. Just in case there is someone who doesn’t know who they are, they are George Henderson, Chairman, John Young, Assistant Chairman, and Bill Kennaugh, Secretary/Treasure.

6.           One piece of old business which I have not reminded everyone for almost three years now, and I thought it would be worth while to hear it once in a while just to remind everyone of the imperfections that we have in our search for our roots, and that is ”The Genealogist’s Ten Commandments”. This message is on SIR’s Website for those who wish a copy of it, and it has been there for the past three years.

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

8.           The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 10:30 A. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for the January meeting will be John Gleed, who will talk on “Databases and Indexes”. John will review two major bodies of datbases and the indexing projects associated with them. They are Ancestry.com and Pilot. All indexes have flaws, and John will show examples and suggest how they came about. He will describe the indexing opportunities in both Ancestry and Pilot. There are opportunities for members of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society to participate in these important projects, and he will discuss the advantages for those who do. John is an outstanding speaker and he has spoken before the group several times. If you want to hear a real interesting speaker, this is the one you should attend, if you are at all interested in Genealogy. He is extremely popular.

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 9:30 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. The Keynote Speaker will be Cath Madden Frindle. I will let you know when more information becomes available. I had passed out flyers last month so you have the latest information. Unfortunately, it had the wrong date. I have copies that has the correct date for those of you who are interested.

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/. Additional information will be announced as it becomes available.

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.      For those of you who are interested in what the military records of either you or one of your relatives did in World War II, it is now relatively easy to obtain this information, sometimes even if the main records were destroyed in the 1972 fire. It is now possible to order personnel records online, if you are the next of kin, such as spouse, child, grandchild, etc., of the veteran. Information that is requested to help find the correct record includes: Complete Name, Service Number, Social Security Number, Branch of Service, Dates of Service, birth date and place, and place of discharge. It may be possible to find a record without this information but the more information supplied the more likely it is that they might find some record. The internet address where this information can be obtained is:  http://www.archives.gov/veterans/evetrecs/index.html If you have trouble with this address, then go to Google and type in “Archives of veterans”, then click on “How to Request Military Service Records or Prove Military Service”, then click on “Use our eVetRecs System to create your request”, and this will get you there. You must fill out all the information that is asked, and after you have finished, you are to print a copy of it and mail it to the address that is shown on the printout. If you are not the veteran or the next of kin, you can still obtain this information by filling out a different form called Standard Form 180. All this procedure is spelled out for you when you open the home page of the Website. After reading the information on the home page, click on the button titled “Request Military Records” and then click on “Continue” at the bottom of the page to continue. This will bring up a “Notice and Privacy Statement” which is in very small print. When finished reading it, click on the “Continue” button at the bottom of this page will lead you through 4 stages for filling in the information that is requested for retrieving the records that you want. Most of the information that is requested is selected from a multiple choice of answers. The steps are very easy to follow, and you probably wont have any trouble. From this site, one can access Military Records by the General Public. One has to go through a little more details in order to obtain this information. I have sent away for my service records during World War II about a month ago just to find out what they have on me, so far I have not received any information yet. However, this office receives about 4,000 requests a month for such service, so I guess they are probably swamped.

14.      I received a very interesting E-Mail last month about “The Genealogy of Harry Reid”, compliments of John Young, that I thought would be of special interest to everyone. This is an excellent example of the frailties and misconceptions that can happen in our research.

15.      As follow-up on my report to you on Electric Magnetic Fields (EMF) by Dr. Rowen, I thought you would  be interested in the additional information that I have come up with from other sources. You will note in all this information that I have been reporting there is nothing that has been stated about what level of EMF is dangerous to one’s health, how much is considered dangerous if received all at once, how much a person could receive over a period of one year with damaging his health, or what is the life-time limit for such exposure. It is more or less guess work at the present time, as far as I can determine anyway. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company included in their billings to everyone last month a little pamphlet entitled “Understanding EMF”. Did anyone notice this pamphlet that was included with their bill? For those of you who did not remember, I will read part of it to you. The most important feature in the entire article was a table of how much EMF one is exposed to in one’s home. Even more interesting was the exposure under distribution and transmission lines. Another short article came out in the latest issue of Consumer Reports entitled “Gauging Cell Phones Possible Risk”, which I will read to you. After all this, you will notice that there is no information as to what level of EMF is dangerous to one’s health. However, I am just glad that at least someone is investigating it.

16.      In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following short article entitled “A Laughing Matter”.

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.