SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

February 1, 2011

130th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, so mark your calendars accordingly.

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 Wednesday, February 16, 2010 at 7:30 P.M., at the Grace Lutheran Church at Alameda de las Pulgas and 29^th Avenue in San Mateo. This is a new location for the group and there is better parking facilities. Come early at 7:30 P.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.

5.           The speaker for this meeting will be Gayle Simons who will speak on the topic “Beyond the U.S. Federal Census”. She will discuss the Special Schedules which offer additional information beyond what is available on the U.S. Federal Population Census. These include Mortality Schedules, Veteran’s Schedules, Agricultural and Manufacturer’s Schedules, and Slave and Native American Schedules. Individual state censuses will be addressed.

6.           The General Meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society that was held on January 15, 2011, was attended by just three of us. They were Bob Shoemaker, Russ Brabec and his wife Eunice, and myself. The speaker for this meeting was Janice M. Sellers who spoke on the topic “Newspaper Research Online”. Newspapers are invaluable in genealogical research because they are an excellent source of information about births, deaths, and more. Although millions of pages of the world’s newspapers are now accessible online, finding the one you want isn’t easy because there is no one place to find them all. Janice gave an overview of what is available and how to find it. Janice is a professional genealogist specializing in Jewish research. She is the editor of “The Galitzianer” and “Zichron Note”, the publicity director for SFBAJGS and a long-time staff member of the Oakland Family History Center. This was an extremely interesting meeting and I am sorry for anyone who missed it. I am passing out an outline of the subjects that were covered at the meeting which were all covered in great detail.

7.           There will be a General Meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society next month on Saturday March 19, 2011, the details for which I will inform you at our meeting next month. The title of the talk will be “Passengers List Annotations”.

8.           For those of you who are interested, the following is a SMCGS General Meeting Schedule for the year 2011:

This schedule will be on our Website for the entire year filed under the February meeting, in case anyone has to look up a meeting. There are no meetings scheduled for August and December.

9.           The San Mateo County Genealogical Society will be giving a series of four classes that are especially designed for beginners this month, which is titled “Do You Know Who You are?”. So jump start your family history research and sign up for this popular series. The series will be given at Canada College Library, 4200 Farm Hill Blvd., in Redwood City.  The cost for the series is $10.00 for members of SMCGC and $20.00 for nonmembers. The time for each of the series is from 12:30 – 2:30 P.M. The dates for this series are shown as follows:

10.      I am passing out a form for all those who think that they would be interested in attending, which they can fill out and mail in to the person who is in charge of putting on this event along with your check. Walk-ins are accepted if there is space.

11.      The Menlo Park Family History Center located at 1105 Valparaiso Avenue, Menlo Park, will be giving a series of six lectures for their Winter 2011 Genealogy Classes. They will meet on the following Saturdays from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M., and will include a lecture, discussion, and hands-on practice. All the classes are free of charge. One can register online at http://mpfhc.org. or by calling 1-(650)-325-9711. There are only three lectures left, and  the titles of those lectures which are remaining are:

a.    February 5, 2011: Changes in the Family Search Program Part I – Sue Allan & Judith Moss – The Basics.

b.    February 12, 2011: Changes in the Family Search Program Part II – John Gleed & Inge Harding-Barlow- Obtaining the Most out of the New Program.

c.     February 26, 2011: Charting Programs Available at MPFHC – Lyle Connell. Printing Genealogical Charts to Enhance Your Family Trees.

12.      Bob Shoemaker was able to obtain an Inventory List of all the Main CDs and other information that is available at the LDS library in the Family History Center in Menlo Park from one of the Winter 2011 Genealogy Classes that he attended last month. I am passing out a copy of this list to everyone so they can have their own personal copy. There is 10 pages of information that is available which you can search through without going down to the library. There just might be some connection in this Inventory List that may be in your lineage. Bob may want to elaborate a little more on this subject.

13.      I thought you might like to know where your taxes go. This is a breakdown of just the Federal taxes that all of us pay per year. The article is published by David Kendall of the Work Digest. The breakdown is numerical order from the largest to the smallest.

14.      I would like to read the following article that was printed in The Washington Post which is titled “Global Warning Alert”.

15.      One last final thought so you would all go home happy, I would like to read the following true story entitled “Apollo II Landing”. It has been years since I read this before, so I am sure some of you have not heard it.

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

17.      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 2010 into a single folder titled “2010 Genealogy Meetings”. The monthly meetings for 2011 will be shown individually until the end of the year, and they also will be placed in a 2011 folder. This will save a great deal of space and make it much easier to look up the meetings.