SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

June 2, 2009

111th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, July 7, 2009. So, everyone please mark their calendar.

3.           Today, Bob Shoemaker will be telling us about what he learned at the Google Seminar that he went to last month. We will get back to Bob after we have finished with the regular business.

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

5.           The next meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 7:30 P. M. in the Main Conference Room of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This meeting will be 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 – less than an hour’s drive from home. The panel of experts will briefly tell you about the highlights of the collection at the National Archives, SMCGS Library, and the Menlo Park Family History Center, and answer any questions you might have. Come a little early and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.

6.           The meeting that was held on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by the San Mateo County Genealogical Society was one of the greatest meetings the society ever had, and those who didn’t attend missed a great presentation. There was only three of us who attended from our group, myself, Rick Dusine, and Bob Shoemaker. The speaker for the this meeting was Steve Morse, who talked on “From DNA to Genetic Genealogy: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask”. To understand the genealogical aspects of genetics requires an understanding of some of the basic concepts. This talk introduced genes, chromosomes, and DNA, and went on to show how DNA is inherited. That knowledge of inheritance can be used for finding relatives you didn’t know you had, learning about your very distant ancestors, the route they traveled. DNA and genealogy is not limited to people. This talk was followed by a short talk by Megan Morse (Steve’s daughter), a wildlife educator who presented and demonstrated some applications to the animal kingdom using a live opossum called Petuna. That was something different. There was so much information that was given it was difficult to retain all of it. Some of the information was passed out on a handout, which I have made a copy for each of you. If you really wanted to understand the concepts of DNA, this was the meeting you should of attended.

7.           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 was voted on at the Society’s last meeting on May 20, 2009, and it was unanimously approved (not one NO vote). All that is left now is for the parties to sign the agreement, and the Society can begin moving. This is a bigger task than it sounds and the actual moving probably wont begin until the first of next year. For anyone who is interested, I have a copy of the actual Grant Agreement, which I will pass around. Maybe Bob Shoemaker has more recent information.

8.           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, and I will have further details when they become available.

9.    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 two lectures of this series is now history. 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 am passing out copies of the announcements to everyone.

10.                       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 them 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.

11.                       For those who are interested, the National Archives and Records Administration, they have announced their Workshop Schedule for 2009. The workshop that was held on March 20, 2009, April 17, 2009, and May 15, 2009 are now history. There are still two remaining workshops which are:

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. After this month, the workshops for this year will be history.

12.      There is a new Search Engine out there that you might be interested in looking at. It is called WolframAlpha and its internet address is www.wolframalpha.com. It has a very impressive introduction and demonstration for those who are interested, but google in no way should be worried about being replaced. In the demonstration, it takes one to some very interesting sites and answers several of one’s questions, but when I asked for some of my favorite questions, it fell down. However, google wasn’t much better. I do not know how good it will be to obtain genealogical information. For the few inputs that I put in, it wasn’t very good. However, give it a little time.

13.      There is another search engine that was passed onto me by Russ Brabec yesterday via his DNA Group, and I haven’t had too much time to research it yet. From the description, it really sound interesting, so I am passing it along. It is located at the internet address http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/Main.aspx. When the page pops up, enter your Surname in the space provided and press either Search or the Enter key on your keyboard. A world map will pop up plus a table at the bottom of the page giving information on the distribution or one’s surname. For more information on a particular country, click on that country. The program at this time covers Western Europe (except Portugal), Scandinavia (except Finland), Poland, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Serbia, USA, Canada, Argentina, India Australia, New Zeland, and Japan. What I was able to find out was that it is mostly kind of a history of where surnames are located or came from. I was not successful in retrieving any particular individual. This program comes with a lot of advertising which takes one to another website, sometimes which has nothing to do with genealogy. So, if anyone finds any more useful information on this website, please let me know. In the meantime, I will keep working on it also.

14.      In closing, I thought it would be interesting if I read the following timely article entitled “Who Am I?”

15.      And now by popular request, I will repeat ”Who is Jack Schitt?”

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

17.      And now Bob Shoemaker wants to tell us about what he learned at the Google Seminar that he went to last month. He said it was very informative and he would like to fill us in on the details, as much as he can remember. He has an excellent set of notes that took for us

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.