SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting

March 1, 2011

131th Meeting

1.           Roll Call.

2.           The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, so mark your calendars accordingly.

3.           Regarding our parking situation for our meetings, there has been a revision. The parking in the McDonalds lot next door is no longer available to us. We can still park on the lot surrounding the Charles Schwab Building and in the garage for disabled members only.

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 Saturday, March 19, 2010 at 10:30 A.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 10:00 A.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.

6.           The speaker for this meeting will be Kay Speaks who will speak on the topic “Interpreting Passenger List Annotations and Manifest Markings”. Prior to attending  a lecture by Marian L. Smith, Kay thought all the random markings and numbers that are located in passenger lists were just an annoyance. Marian Smith’s lecture was like a genie rubbing a magic lamp granting your wish for enlightenment! Researchers may find annotations may provide the clues to break through their brick wall! Kay is a member of the Livermore Amador Genealogical Society where she has been a conference coordinator, speaker, workshop leader, and writer for the quarterly Roots Tracer”.

7.           The General Meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society that was held on February 16, 2011, was attended by just two of us. They were Bob Shoemaker and myself. The speaker for this meeting was Gayle Simons who spoke on the topic “Beyond the U.S. Federal Census”. She discussed 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 were also addressed.

8.           There will be a General Meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society next month on Wednesday April 20, 2011, the details for which I will inform you at our meeting next month. The title of the talk will be “Black Sheep in Your Family”, given by John Gleed.

9.           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.

10.      The British Library is digitizing up to 40 million pages of newspapers, including fragile dailies dating back three and half centuries. Once completed the British newspapers documenting local, regional, and national life spanning to the 1700’s will be fully accessible and you will be able to search it online. The library’s 750 million pages of newspapers, the largest collection of newspapers in the world are currently on microfilm or bound in bulky volumes.

The library is focusing on digitizing newspapers that document historical events. It also is focusing on fields of family history and genealogy. This will safeguard the future on the vast archive and allow us to research this wonderful collection from our computers. When will all this information become available, no one really knows. When it does, it will be a boom to those of English ancestry. This article came from the May 2010 article in the San Mateo Times.

11.      The San Mateo County Genealogy Society Spring Seminar will be held on April 30, 2011 from 9:00 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., that is next month, which will be held at the Menlo Park LDS Church. The speaker will be Susan Goss Johnston who will speak on “The Best Things in Life Are Free”. This is an extremely worthwhile seminar for anyone who is interested in genealogy to attend. I am passing out what information that I have for those of you who would be interested. I will have more information about this event next month.

12.      In case you feel that you have not attended enough genealogy meetings, there are several meetings going on all over the country. The 42^nd Annual Southern California Genealogy Jamboree will be held on June 10-12, 2011 at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank Airport, Burbank, California. There will be 45 plus speakers talking on about every subject one could imagine. To find out more on this go to www.scgsgenealogy.com on the internet.

On September 7-10, 2011 in beautiful Springfield, Illinois the 2011 Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference will be giving “Pathways to the Heartland”, A Conference for the Nations’s Genealogists. This conference will be hosted by the Illinois State Genealogical Society. This year’s conference offers an exciting opportunity for anyone interested in researching their family history. There will be over 165 educational sessions and 13 luncheons which are designed to balance the needs of genealogists at all levels, exploring a variety of records, strategies, and other tools available to those interested in researching their family history. For those who are interested contact Diane Smelker at president@smcgs.org.

13.      I thought you might be interested in security in the internet on your computer.

What is the difference between http and https

*The main difference between http:// and https:// is It's all about keeping you secure.

HTTP stands for HyperText Transport Protocol, which is just a fancy way of saying it's a protocol (a language, in a manner of speaking) for information to be passed back and forth between web servers and clients.

You really don't need to know what it all stands for. The important thing is the letter S which makes the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. The S (big surprise) stands for "Secure".

If you visit a website or webpage, and look at the address in the web browser, it will likely begin with the following: http://. This means that the website is talking to your browser using the regular 'unsecure' language. In other words, it is possible for someone to "eavesdrop" on your computer's conversation with the website. If you fill out a form on the website, someone might see the information you send to that site.

This is why you should never enter your credit card number in an http website!

But if the web address begins with https://, that basically means your computer is talking to the website in a secure code that no one can eavesdrop on.

You understand why this is so important, right? If a website ever asks you to enter your credit card information, you should automatically look to see if the web address begins with https://. If it doesn't, there's no way you're going to enter sensitive information like a credit card number!

14.      Back to a little genealogy information. Several years ago I had brought up the topic of how one should list the names of women who are married. Because we have some new members with us who were not with us at that time, I think it would be worth while repeating it again. In order to keep things straight in one’s genealogy program, women should always be listed by their maiden names. Listing them by their married names can cause a great deal of confusion in a genealogy program, because of several reasons. One reason is that if she were married several times, she would be listed under several names if her married names were used. How a genealogy program would handle this would be confusing to say the least. It is very difficult for a computer program to handle any person whose name has changed. In order to avoid all this confusion, it has been established that all women shall be recorded by their maiden names. This has solved a great deal of difficulty in genealogy programs. Women have been know throughout their married life by their married names, but when it comes to genealogy, the fact that their name was changed becomes incidental, compared to the large scope of relatives before and after any particular women was born. However, what happens when a man changes his name, for any of many reasons, such as when he immigrates to the United States and he has his name Americanized. This creates an almost insurmountable problem, and is not as easy to overcome as it was with women. In order to keep things straight, any change in a man’s name must be recorded somehow, or one would loose all connection with his ancestors or his children. One can make a note of this change in notes, sources, or citations. This would record such an event alright, but what are the chances anyone would find it. I have developed a better means of solving this problem. Say that I changed my name from George Henderson to George Smith. For the home page where I appear I would list my name as George (Henderson) Smith, putting my former name in parentheses. This would interpret as for all heirs that come after me my name is George Smith, and for all heirs before me my name is George Henderson. This would make the two names noticeable to anyone and still have the genealogy program list me in correct order.

15.      I would like to read the following article which is titled “How The Internet Got Started”.

16.      One last final thought so you would all go home happy, I would like to read the following article titled “The 100 Mile per Hour Goat”.

17.      Are there any questions or more information that one wishes to bring before 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. 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.