Meet the Authors: Gena Philibert Ortega and Jean Wilcox Hibben, CG

Monday, July 22, 2013
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2
Oakland, California 94612

The California Genealogical Society is pleased to welcome genealogists and authors, Jean Wilcox Hibben, CG, and Gena Philibert Ortega.

Elisabeth: The Story of a German Immigrant is based on Jean's genealogical research of her great-grandmother who left her homeland and five children to escape an abusive husband. The novel details Elisabeth's efforts to reunite her family in mid-late19th century Chicago and New York.

Elisabeth: The Story of a German Immigrant
2012 by Jean Wilcox Hibben

eBook, Lulu Press

ISBN: 9781300172055

Gena's From the Family Kitchen is a three-part keepsake that will help you celebrate your family recipes and record the precious memories they hold. The book will show you how to uncover historical recipes and food traditions which offer insight into your ancestors' everyday lives.

From the Family Kitchen: Discover Your Food Heritage and Preserve Favorite Recipes

2012 by Gena Philibert Ortega

Hardcover, F+W Media, Inc.

ISBN: 1440318271 

Please register online.

The book event is free and open to public but seating is limited so pre-registration is requested. Please arrive early.

Gena's book will be available for purchase and autograph by the author. Jean's e-book is available in iOS format from iTunes and as a Nook Book from Barnes and Noble. Please note that the e-book is set up for single downloads that cannot be copied from one device to another.

Jean and Gena's visit to CGS is part of a statewide book tour. For more information visit Gena and Jean Genealogy Tour blog.

Jean Wilcox Hibben, certified genealogist and national speaker, is a retired college professor with MA (Speech Communication) and PhD (Folklore) degrees. She serves in leadership positions for several genealogical groups including, Director of the Corona, California Family History Center; president of both the Corona Genealogical Society and Southern Calif. Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists; board member of the Association of Professional Genealogists; and secretary of the Genealogical Speakers Guild. She is also an occasional volunteer at the National Archives, Pacific Region, Riverside.


Gena Philibert Ortega holds two Master’s degrees, one in Interdisciplinary Studies (Psychology and Women’s Studies) and in Religion. She serves as vice-president of the Southern California Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists and lectures on various subjects involving genealogy. Gena previously published two other works: Putting the Pieces Together and Cemeteries of the Eastern Sierra. She writes extensively for genealogy newsletters, magazines and blogs.

Jean Wilcox Hibben photo by Pam McComb-Podmostko ©2009.

Copyright © 2013 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library.

The Legacy of Florence Walter at The Book Club of California

Jane Hufft, Bill O'Neil and I had the pleasure of attending the exhibit opening of "The Legacy of Florence Walter: Celebrating a Century" on Monday, April 29, 2013. We were invited by Henry Snyder, CGS Library Committee Chair and member of our board of directors. Henry also happens to hold the same titles at The Book Club of California where the exhibit is on display through the summer.

Florence Schwartz Walter (1884-1972)

The Legacy of Florence Walter: Celebrating a Century features forty-five exquisite book bindings by one of San Francisco’s most celebrated artists in this genre. The exhibit was curated by Kathleen Burch and John McBride.

Florence Walter was prominent in social and cultural circles in San Francisco for decades. She had a notable collection of Asian art was also a professional bookbinder, described as "one of the finest bookbinders in the French style working in the United States."

Walter joined The Book Club of California in 1913  and was the first woman elected to the board and its first woman president.

The exhibition was made possible by three of the grandchildren of Walter who donated the bindings and related ephemera to the Book Club for its Florence Walter Collection. Several members of the family were present and spoke at the opening.

The exhibition also includes examples of Walter’s work from other sources. It is the largest collection of the work of Florence Walter in an institution.
The Legacy of Florence Walter: Celebrating a Century runs through August 26, 2013.

The Book Club of California, located at 312 Sutter Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, is a non-profit organization of people who take pleasure in fine printing related to the history and literature of California and the Western states. They help further the interests of book collectors and scholars, and promote an understanding and appreciation of fine books.



Copyright © 2013 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library.

Bad Indians: a Tribal Memoir – Book Event with Deborah Miranda

Saturday, January 26, 2013
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2
Oakland, California 94612

The California Genealogical Society is pleased to welcome author Deborah A. Miranda who will read from her new book, Bad Indians: a Tribal Memoir.

The book integrates California Mission Indian tribal history, family and oral histories and also features a genealogy based on her mother's work that traces her Ohlone/Costanoan-Essalen ancestors A powerful account of loss and survival, Miranda reassembles the shards of her people's past in this groundbreaking book.

Seating is limited. Please arrive early.

Bad Indians: a Tribal Memoir

2013 by Deborah A. Miranda

Paperback, 6 x 9, 240 pagesISBN: 978-1-59714-201-4
$18.95

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, and is also of Chumash and Jewish ancestry. The author of two poetry collections – Indian Cartography, which won the Diane Decorah Award for First Book from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas, and The Zen of La Llorona, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award – she also has a collection of essays, The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. Miranda is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University and says reading lists for her students include as many books by 'bad Indians' as possible.

Copyright © 2012 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Gather at the Table Book Signing Event

Sunday, January 20, 2013
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Museum of the African Diaspora
685 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

Two people, one journey, from slavery to healing.

Gather at the Table, The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade is the chronicle of Tom DeWolf and Sharon Morgan’s shared journey toward racial reconciliation. Over a three year period, the pair traveled thousands of miles—visiting ancestral towns, courthouses, cemeteries, plantations, antebellum mansions, and historic sites both overseas and in twenty-seven states—and engaged in deep conversations about how the lingering trauma of slavery shaped their lives.

DeWolf and Morgan will share the story of their journey and lead attendees through an interactive exercise.

Museum admission: $10 adults, $5 seniors (65 and over) and full-time students with ID. FREE for children 12 and under. Seating is limited to the first eighty people. Please arrive early.

Sharon Morgan and Tom DeWolf
photo credit: Kristin Little

This event is sponsored by the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (AAGSNC), Museum of the African Diaspora, and the California Genealogical Society and Library.

Update: Authors Sharon Morgan and Tom DeWolf were interviewed on Christmas Day by Celeste Headlee on "Tell Me More" on NPR. You can read the transcript or listen to the program stream Descendants of Slaves, Slave Traders, Come Together.

Copyright © 2012 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Wordless Wednesday

March Membership Meeting and Book Launch

"Over, Under, Around and Through Lost Records" 

with Raking the Ashes Author Nancy Peterson

Photographs courtesy of Tim Cox, 3/12/2011, Oakland, California.

Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library.

March Membership Meeting and Book Launch with Nancy Peterson

Saturday, March 12, 2011
12:00 p.m.

California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2
Oakland, California

It's been looked over, checked, examined, proofed and proofed again. Review copies have been mailed out and it looks like we may make the April 18, 2011 publication date. Raking the Ashes: Genealogical Strategies for Pre-1906 San Francisco Research, second edition, by Nancy S. Peterson, is almost here!

Celebrate with us as we launch our newest publication at the March membership meeting. The festivities will start at noon. We will have a special pre-publication price for members who come and order an advance copy.

After a short membership meeting at 1:00 p.m., Nancy will present a talk, "Climbing Over, Under, Around and Through Lost Records."

Nancy Simons Peterson is a Stanford graduate and certified genealogist and the author of numerous articles. She won the Society of Genealogists Scholar Award in 2003. Her narrative genealogy Guarded Pasts: The Lives and Offspring of Colonel George and Clara (Baldwin) Bomford was the winning entry in the 1998 National Genealogical Society Family History Writing Contest and is used as an example of quality work in the NGS Quarterly style on the Board for Certification of Genealogists Web site.

Nancy's search for her maternal San Francisco ancestors led ultimately to the publication of the first edition of Raking the Ashes in 2006 to coincide with the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.


Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Wordless Wednesday

Autumn Celebration of Books
Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Photographs courtesy of Jane Knowles Lindsey and Arlene Miles, Oakland, California.


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Member Book - Letters From the Storm: Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster

One of the member authors who will be with us at our upcoming Autumn Book Launch is Linda Foster Arden. Arden recently published Letters from the Storm: The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster, 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers about her great-great grandparents, Mary Jane Strain and John Alexander Hastings Foster. Married in 1858, they lived in Rural Valley, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.

The book features one hundred transcribed letters written from 1862 through 1865 by Lieutenant Foster, mostly to his wife Mary Jane, set against the background of all the major Civil War battles involving the Army of the Potomac, 5th Corp.

Skillfully interspersed with Linda Arden's commentary about the events and situations of the era, these letters are a time capsule of the mid-nineteenth century. In many respects, Foster's letters mirror the comments made by soldiers on both sides: their efforts to seek comfort with news from home, their litany of complaints about the rigors of camp and battle, and their descriptions of men and events on the front lines.

Linda Foster Arden holds a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics from Eastern Michigan University and California State University-Hayward. For thirty-five years, Ms. Arden worked for major corporations as an information technology consultant, responsible for project management and acquisition negotiations. She lives with her husband, Ted Arden, a retired American history teacher, who helped her conceive the idea for this book. While doing much of the research and writing, they lived for two summers on a 150-year-old farm in Western Pennsylvania. Currently she lives in Clayton, California, at the foot of Mt. Diablo, where she enjoys reading, camping, working on family history and genealogy, and being a grandmother to Samantha. 

Letters from the Storm: The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster, 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers
2010 by Linda Foster Arden; Edited by Dr. Walter L. Powell.  
Indexed, 53 illustrations and photos 365 pages, 7 x 10 soft cover
Price: $29.95


Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Book Launch: Come Celebrate Our New Books!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Coffee and cider 10:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Program 11:00 a.m.
Refreshments and book browsing 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

California Genealogical Society and Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2
Oakland, California 94612

Fall Book Party! You Are Invited! Come Leaf Through the New Publications!

Join us at the society for “An Autumn Celebration of Books” as we launch three significant new titles and celebrate the resurrection of our journal, The California Nugget.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow and the sturdiest family trees are rooted in sound research. Our publications will help you find your way through the forest! We are very excited about presenting these new “leaves," and we're proud of these meticulously researched publications that will contribute valuable information and new resources to the genealogical community.

This event heralds the publication of three new titles:

• San Francisco Probate 1906 - 1942: Register of Actions
• San Francisco Deaths 1865-1904: Abstracts from Surviving Civil Records
• The Ancestry of Theodore Timothy Judge and Ellen Sheehy Judge: Including the Families of Boland, Roussel, Harman, McMurphy, Kelley, Bohane, Chapin, Freiermuth, Taylor, Moore and Farneman

We're also asking our member authors with new titles to join the celebration and to be available for questions and books signings. Please email me if you can join the fun!

Update (8/9/2010): Three member authors will be celebrating their books with us.

• Linda Foster Arden - Letters From the Storm: The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J. A. H. Foster    
• Ron Arons - WANTED! U.S. Criminal Records 
• James Smith - The California Snatch Racket: Kidnappings During the Prohibition and Depression Eras

Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday
CGS March Membership Meeting with Frances Dinkelspiel
Saturday, March 14, 2009

Photographs by Kathryn M. Doyle, Oakland, California.

March Membership Meeting - Frances Dinkelspiel

March Membership Meeting
Saturday, March 14, 2009
1:00 p.m.
CGS Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2
Oakland, California 94612

The California Genealogical Society is pleased to have local Bay Area author Frances Dinkelspiel as the guest speaker at our March membership meeting. Her book, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, is a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller which has been getting rave reviews since its publication by St. Martins Press in November 2008.

Frances will share some of the backstory about how she learned about her great-great-grandfather and the eight years she spent researching and writing the book. Isaias Hellman’s story is a page-turner and a must-read for anyone interested in California history. The book is a who's who of the banking world made even more facinating by the tie-ins to today's financial crisis.

It's fitting that Frances lecture at the CGS Library because a bit of her research was done here - a small bit when compared to the time she spent at the California Historical Society reviewing some forty cartons of material containing over 50,000 pages of archival documents including letters, receipts, copy books, court cases and newspaper articles.

Dinkelspiel is a fifth-generation Californian who grew up in San Francisco. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she spent more than twenty years in the newspaper business, working as a general assignment reporter for Syracuse newspapers in upstate New York and the San Jose Mercury News. She has taught at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. Her freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, People Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press and the Los Angeles Times.

Frances is also the author of a literary blog, Ghost Word: Ethereal Thoughts on Books and Writing
Please note that the short membership meeting starts promptly at 1:00 p.m. Frances' talk follows at about 1:20 p.m. She will be available afterward to autograph and sell books. Please arrive early.

Towers of Gold

Last Saturday night I attended a book reading by Frances Dinkelspiel at A Great Good Place for Books in Montclair. Frances is the author of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. The challenge was to try and distill 335 pages and an eight year process into a fifteen minute talk. It can't be done but Frances shared enough about her great-great-grandfather that it left her audience wanting to know more. The story behind the title is priceless and begs the question, "Is there a modern-day Isaias Hellman who can solve today's financial crisis?"

Frances and I actually "met" a few months ago because of the CGSL blog. I was looking through Sitemeter or MyBlogLog stats and noticed that a reader had come from a blog called Ghost Word. That reader was Frances and Ghost Word is her blog about books and reading. I learned that she was a local (Berkeley) author about to publish her first book.

Frances has been getting rave reviews for Towers of Gold. I've been following her progress as she climbs the Amazon.com sales rank. And I'm happy to report that CGS Events Chair Carolyn Steinberg is scheduling Frances to come and speak at CGS in 2009. It's fitting because a bit of her research was done at our library – a small bit when compared to the time she spent at the California Historical Society reviewing over forty cartons of her gg-grandfather's papers.

Susan Kitchens of the Family Oral History Using Digital Tools blog wrote a fantastic review – Towers of Gold: History of the Man Indistinguishable From the History of California. She admonishes everyone to "Just Read It."

The book has much to offer. If you’re interested in the history of California and the West, or history of Jews in America, or the history of railroads, banking or how large economies are built, or if you wish to contrast the dynamics of today’s economic gloom with yesteryear’s boom, you will find Towers of Gold to be an eminently worthwhile read. Additionally, if you’re a personal or family historian, this is a valuable reference for those whose ancestors crossed paths with Isaias Hellman. Finally, Towers of Gold is a triumphant example of the best possible outcome from a visit to your local historical society.

I'll amend this post as soon as I know the specific date that Ms. Dinkelspiel will speak at CGS.
Update: CGS is pleased to have Frances as our March Membership Meeting speaker on Saturday, March 14, 2009.