SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
July 7, 2009
112th Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, August 4, 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. The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 10:30 A. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The speaker for this meeting will be Marcia Holstrom, and she will be talking 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 will be “Let’s explore together this movement of our ancestors from the Atlantic Coast to the Big Muddy”. This should be an extremely interesting meeting. There will be no meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society in August, and their next meeting will be in September.
5. The meeting that was held on Wednesday, June 17, 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 from our group, who were myself and Bob Shoemaker. This meeting was given by a panel of experts on “Your Genealogy Stay Vacation on the Peninsula”. The Internet is an important resource for genealogy, but not everything we need for our genealogy is on the Internet yet. Once in a while, we need to get away from the computer and discover the wonderful repositories here on the peninsula, all of which are less than an hour’s drive from home. The panel of experts briefly told us about the highlights of the collection at the National Archives, SMCGS Library, Sutro Library, and the Menlo Park Family History Center, and answered any questions you might have. The National Archives was explained to us by Rose Mary Kennedy who is the manager of the National Archives in San Bruno, and went into a great detail what is available to us in the archives. A report on the status and description of the new library for the San Mateo county Genealogical Society at La Cañada College was given by Diane Smelker, the President of San Mateo County Genealogical Society. Pat Gilbride gave a report on the material that is available at the Sutro Library in San Francisco. Sue Allen gave a report on the material that was available at the Family History Center in Menlo Park. The material that was presented and the discussion afterwards was extremely informative.
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. Arrangements are now being made for the actual moving which probably wont begin until the first of next year. They are in desperate need for volunteers to help in the moving process. Any who can help, would be most appreciated. For a description of what will be available in our new library, I will read from the following list. Maybe Bob Shoemaker has further details on this subject.
7. The San Mateo County Genealogical Society’s Fall Seminar will occur on October 24 of this year. So mark your calendar so you will be sure to remember it. The speaker will be Karen Clifford, who is an accredited Genealogist and is author of 7 college textbooks on genealogy. I will have further details when they become available.
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 three lectures of this series is now history, and there are only three 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 last 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, that is this Saturday, 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 Workshop for the National Archives and Records Administration are now history. For those of you who missed this series, the series will be probably be presented again next year.
11. It is now time to fill you in on the details on the new version of the Family Tree Maker 2009 which I have just purchased and installed. This 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. The new program is installed separately onto your 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 and the old version of the new 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. 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. By creating an entirely new program for Family Tree Maker, I was suspicious as to whether they retained Microsoft Access as their Data Base. I found out that they do not use Access for their Data Base any more. So I telephoned Family Maker to see if the Family Tree Maker can be used in Apple products. They informed me that it was still not possible to use Family Tree Maker in Apple. That is yet! They are working on it, so that it may be possible someday. The biggest problem with the new version is that they changed the method for storing pictures in their program. This is both good news and bad news. Now, for any pictures to be incorporated into the Family Tree Program, they must be linked to some other program in one’s computer that is storing one’s pictures. This reasoning was made by the Family Tree Maker because their was too much storage being taken up in the Family Tree Program for storing pictures, and it was going to become a problem when this amount of room got so large that it was eventually going to corrupt the operation of the Family Tree program in some manner. This was the good news. The bad news is that not all pictures can be linked into Family Tree Maker. I have most all my pictures stored in my Microsoft Word Files, and Family Tree Maker will not accept these files if linked. So my problem becomes that I have to convert all my pictures into a program that is acceptable by Family Tree Maker so I can link the files. Files with the extension .doc, are not acceptable with Family Tree Maker. It prefers .jpg files, .pdf files, and maybe some other file extensions. This has become a serious problem for me to find a way of converting all my Word files into jpg files.
12. In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following timely article that was passed on to me by Bob Shoemaker entitled “The Dam”. This a true story.
13. One more interesting comment that I couldn’t resist, entitled ”Advice from the Rabbi”.
14. However, there is still one more thing that I would like to share with you, entitled “How Time Improves Everything”.
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.