SIR’s Genealogy Group Meeting
May 3, 2011
133th Meeting
1. Roll Call.
2. The Next regular Meeting for this Group is scheduled to be held on Tuesday, June 7, 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 Saturday, May 21, 2010 at 10:30 A.M., at the Grace Lutheran Church at Alameda de las Pulgas and 29th Avenue in San Mateo. That is this month. Come early at 10:00 A.M. to visit and enjoy delicious refreshments before the meeting.
5. The speaker for this meeting will be Marcia Holstrom who will speak on the topic “Social Networking for Genealogists”. Social Networking may be great for some and a mystery to others, but does it help us in our Family History Research? Marcia explores this question for us, looking at some of these information exchange opportunities and their value or lack of value to us in our search for quality rather than quantity in our research. Marcia Holstrom was trained as a geographer, and is now a popular genealogy lecturer and teacher. It should be an interesting talk.
6. The General Meeting of the San Mateo County Genealogical Society that was held on April 20, 2011, was attended by just two of us. They were Kevin Moran and myself. If you missed this meeting, you missed one of the best meetings the group has ever held. The speaker for this meeting was John Shellabear Gleed who spoke on the topic “Black Sheep in Your Family”. John’s presentation helped you pursue information on those persons in your family which “no one will talk about”. He offered a definition of “Black Sheep” and presented a set of five categories of the genre. John showed examples of information, and offer ideas on how to break down those two brickwalls of this type of research which are “Disappearance” and “Name Change”. John categorized the five groups within the Black Sheep Flocks as: Black Hole which were the Violent Criminals; White Collar which were the Non-Violent Criminals; Scarlet Letter which were the Love Gone Wrong; Deep Purple which were the Mixed Marriage; and Gray Areas which were the All the Many Other Flocks. I am passing out a copy of his entire talk which is a very-comprehensive report. He also gives a bibliography list of where one can obtain information on Black Sheep on the back page, which could be extremely useful. Almost everyone has a Black Sheep somewhere lurking in one’s background, it would just be interesting to know who it is. Mine, for example, is two of my aunts. No one in our family knows what happened to them. We didn’t find out about this until only about two years ago, and now all of our aunts and relatives of that era are now dead. Too late.
7. The San Mateo County Genealogy Society Spring Seminar was held on Saturday, April 30, 2011, It was held at the Menlo Park LDS Church, 1105 Valparaiso, Menlo Park. The speaker was Susan Goss Johnston who spoke on “The Best Things in Life Are Free”. There were three of our group who attended, who were Russ Brabec, Bob Shoemaker, and myself. There was a grand total of 123 who attended this seminar, which is the largest attendance yet that has ever attended these seminars in the past. Susan Goss is a frequent speaker at Bay Area genealogy meetings and conferences. She is a graduate of the National Institute on Genealogical Research “Advanced Methodology and Evidence Analysis” course at Stanford University, and the National Archives course “Going to the Source”. Susan’s personal research focuses on families in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. Her lectures included real-life examples and case studies. At this Seminar one learned how to dig deeper into free websites and navigate the “Deep Web”. I have a copy of the handout that was given to us at the meeting, and anyone is free to look at it if one wishes. I did not make copies of it because the handout is 19 pages long, which would not only be expensive but very laborious to recreate it. Although there is a world of FREE information out there, it may be of some use but is usually very difficult to find the information one is after. For example, the last lecture of the seminar concentrated on censuses. The best example that was given for viewing censuses was taken from the website http://www.archive.org/details/genealogy. I spent several hours on this website trying to find some members of my family, including myself, but I had to give up. Susan Goss had no trouble obtaining information as was illustrated in her talk. However, I do not know how long it took her to master this site. This site was not near as good as Ancestory.com, but Ancestory.com costs money. These seminars are extremely worthwhile attending for anyone who is interested in genealogy.
8. The San Mateo County Genealogy Society Fall Seminar will be held on Saturday, October 29, 2011 from 9:00 A.M. to 3:15 P.M. The speaker will be John Colletta, Ph. D., who is one of America’s most popular genealogical lecturers. I will let you know of more details about this seminar when they become available.
9. Again, in case you feel that you have not attended enough genealogy meetings, there are several meetings going on all over the country. This is the third time that I have made this announcement. The 42nd 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.
10. I thought it would be interesting to review where Genealogy information can be obtained in San Francisco. This is a refresher on the main places of research. I have mentioned these places before, but it has been several years since I brought this subject up, so I thought it be worth while mentioning them again.
a. San Francisco Main Library at 100 Larkin Street in the Civic Center area. Web: sfpl.org
b. The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco at the City Hall Light Court at Van Ness Avenue. They have lost their lease and will need to relocate by June 1, 2011. Check the web for location and contact information. Web: www.sfmuseum.org
c. Sutro Library is the San Francisco branch of the California State Library, and is located at 480 Winston Drive behind the Stonestown Galleria mall, just north of San Francisco State University campus. This is the largest genealogy collection west of Salt Lake City. Web: www.library.ca.gov.
d. Fort Mason which is located along the northern waterfront of San Francisco between Aquatic Park and the Golden Gate Bridge in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It reflects not only the city’s military history but also rich ethic trtaditions. Web: www.fortmason.org/aboutus/visitor-information.
e. National Archives and Records Administration, 1000Commodore Drive, San Bruno, west of the Tanforan Shopping Center. Web: www.archives.gov/pacific/san-francisco.
11. The latest news that is floating around the world today is the nuclear accident that occurred in one of the nuclear reactors in Japan, and the resulting radiation that the country was exposed to. This is not strictly genealogical, but I thought you would be interested in hearing about the Radiation Dose that one can receive safely and unsafely. The radiation dose that a person can absorb from any of various sources is called the “sievert”. Where this term came from, I do not know, it use to be call the “roentgen”. The term measures the effect a dose of radiation will have on the cells of the human body, all at once. A certain dose will make one sick and a large dose will kill you. However, we can safely absorb small amounts of natural radiation daily, which will not effect us but it is necessary for all living things. The cumulative long-term absorption plays a big role in one’s body, such as a cancer risk. Some examples of what certain doses of radiation have on a person are: Anyone who receives a dose of 8 sieverts will be fatal, even with treatment. A dental or chest x-ray, one would absorb 5 micro sieverts, or it would take about 1 million such x-rays to equal the fatal dose. The background dose that one would receive by an average person over one normal day is about 10 micro sieverts, which is about twice the amount from one dental x-ray. The maximum yearly radiation dose that is permitted for U.S. radiation workers is 50 milisieverts, which is about equal to 10,000 dental x-rays. Ten minutes next to the Chernobyl rector core after the exlosion and meltdown was 50 sieverts or six times the fatal dose. The lowest one-year dose that is clearly linked to increased cancer risk is 100 milisievers, which is equal to 10,000 times the normal background dose.
12. I would like to read the following article titled “Pregnant at 71”.
13. One last final thought, I would like to read the following article titled “Elevators”.
14. Are there any questions or more information that one wishes to bring before us?
15. 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.