Some Nice Press From A Surprising Source

I mentioned last month that advertising our First Saturdays Free "Intro to Genealogy" classes on internet events sites like Yelp, Yahoo Upcoming and Facebook seems to be reaching a new and younger audience. This month's April 3 class, taught by Mary Beth Frederick, included a student who found us on Yelp and who was interested in more than just learning some genealogy.

Brianna Headsten let us know in advance that she was coming and that she would be writing an article about the class for her school newspaper. A communications student at California State University East Bay, Brianna is on the staff of The Pioneer. I was thrilled to receive a copy of her article, All Branches Have Common Roots, published on April 8, 2010, and assurances that she will be back to do more research on her family history.

Thanks so much, Brianna!

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

Hard Drive Organization - Making Use of Your Computer File Folders

Saturday, May 15, 2010
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

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

After collecting digital images from online sources and manually scanning paper documents and photos for over twenty years, Tim Cox found a management method that works for his digital files. He will demonstrate how to name files for easy identification, how to organize folders that make it easy to find them, and how to properly identify scanned photographs.


This class is a free benefit for members only. Class size is limited to twenty participants. Walk-ins will not be admitted.

Register online.

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

Wordless Wednesday

Intermediate Genealogy: Immigration

Jane Knowles Lindsey

Photograph by Kathryn M. Doyle, 2/16/2010, Oakland, California



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

May Membership Meeting (and a Bonus!) with Jo Ann Rowley-Minhoto

Saturday, May 8, 2010
California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway, Suite LL2, Oakland, California

Member Jo Ann Rowley-Minhoto will present two talks on our second Saturday May Membership Meeting day. Please plan to come in the morning for her first presentation, break for a brown bag lunch (or pick something up nearby), attend a short membership meeting at 1:00 p.m., then hear Jo Ann's second talk.

Rootsweb Overview
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

RootsWeb is one of the free and diverse collections of information that's been available for quite some time and is still valuable. Mailing lists and message boards, online education, surname connections, other data and more, on a world-wide scope. Join us to learn more.

Membership Meeting

1:00 p.m.

Social Networking: What's Available at RootsWeb
1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

After a brief overview of some "Social Networking" terms and examples, we'll focus on what's available at RootsWeb. Mailing Lists, message boards, and blogs at RootsWeb are there to help us interact with others while researching our families and interests.

After a career as system analyst of computer business applications, Jo Ann Rowley-Minhoto turned her attention to genealogy in 1996 and parlayed both into her business, Computer Ancestors. She loves giving presentations, hoping to give someone value in their research. Jo Ann completed the National Genealogical Society's (NGS) "American Genealogy: A Basic Course" in 2004, received a certificate from Dallas Genealogical Society's (DGS) Land Institute in 1999, is a member of Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), and takes clients, both for computer related assistance and assistance in researching one's family history.

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

Mapping Madness with Ron Arons - Sunday, April 18, 2010

Sunday, April 18, 2010
1:00 p.m. (Doors open at 12:30 p.m.)

Oakland Regional Family History Center
4766 Lincoln Avenue
Oakland 94602

San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society Lecture and Meeting: Mapping Madness with Ron Arons

Member and author Ron Arons will be the featured speaker at an upcoming SFBAJGS meeting. Ron will discuss numerous websites where one can find historical maps and he will review the online mapping facilities provided by the two Goliaths in the field: Microsoft and Google. He will also introduce the audience to several other online mapping facilities, including: Microsoft’s MapCruncher, IBM’s Many Eyes, and Muckety.com

Born and raised in New York, Ron Arons has traced his roots to England, Poland, Romania, the Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. In researching his book, The Jews of Sing Sing, Ron took a genealogical approach, collecting a variety of original source documents. The book includes biographies of more than a dozen famous gangsters and lesser-known criminals and paints a broad canvas of Jewish criminality in New York City. Ron's newest book is the recently released Wanted! U.S. Criminal Records: Sources and Research Methodology.

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

eNews April 2010, volume 4, number 4

The April 2010 issue of the eNews, volume 4, number 4, has been published and emailed to members and friends. As always, the eNews features timely information about the California Genealogical Society and our upcoming events. Each edition also includes Suggested Links From the Blogosphere and a photo feature: CGS Ancestors.

This month we have a mystery man. Can you help member Susan Smith-Bromiley and her cousin, Vicky Whitney Landau, discover what happened to their great-uncle, Joseph B. Mendizábal?

Joseph B. Mendizábal

All past issues of the eNews are available for viewing at the eNews ARCHIVE. The May 2010 issue will be emailed on April 30, 2010. To receive a copy, please join our mailing list.

Wordless Wednesday

Visit to the Library
Tour by Dick Rees
Santa Clara Gen-Study Group

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Photograph by Kathryn M. Doyle, Oakland, California.

Discover Your Swedish Roots Using Genline

Wednesday, May 5, 2010
1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

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

Learn how to research Swedish Church records to trace your Swedish ancestry. Peter Wallenskog, CEO of Genline AB and Kathy Meade, Genline’s North American representative, will give a presentation on Swedish genealogy and demonstrate how to trace one’s roots using Genline, an online service that contains digital images of the original Swedish Church Books archive from the 16th century to the 20th century.

In addition, Peter and Kathy will demonstrate Genline’s new exciting initiative connecting the Swedish Church Books to Bygdeband, a site containing historical information about places, where one can gain a deeper understanding of the place where one’s Swedish ancestor lived.

Free to all participants with preregistration.

Register online.



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

Overview: Microsoft Office 2007

Saturday, May 1, 2010
1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

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

Join Tim Cox as he gives a high level overview of the Microsoft Office 2007 Suite of applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You may bring your laptop but it's not required.

This class is a free benefit for members only. Class size is limited to twenty participants.

Walk-ins will not be admitted.

Register online.

Shirley Thomson's Report From Washington, D.C.

Shirley Thomson consented to share this from her recent trip:

I’m just back from a week of research fun in Washington, DC. The relevance of that for CGS friends is that I traveled with Bette Kot. Bette was CGS’s librarian for several years during which time she served the society in many capacities, including board of directors and publication committee. She moved from Walnut Creek to Parker, Colorado, five years ago where she now teaches genealogy and continues to stay busy researching Gorrell family history.

Bette and I traveled with Sandy Aberer, a fellow The Master Genealogist (TMG) software user who lives locally in Diablo, to visit the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Library. We enjoyed it all, even with six days of rain and cold weather. The libraries serve a wonderfully rich banquet of information to researchers who all too often get by on crumbs of data and slender tidbits of history.

Shirley Thomson, Bette Kot and Sandy Aberer

The difficult part was deciding how best to use our hours there. In the end, time was about equally divided between the three libraries. Happily, both NARA and the LC offer evening hours.

NARA:  I wanted to find Civil War pension files for two ancestors. Indexes to pension files are available on Footnote.com and at the Archives, of course, for those arriving unprepared.

One of my men was listed with both an invalid pension and a pension for minor children at his death. The other’s record also contained two—an invalid application and certificate and a widow’s pension application and certificate. Armed with the numbers, I submitted “pull requests” to the Archives staff. They pulled the files from the vast collection of archived records and made them available in about an hour.

Taking my newly issued researchers’ ID card (acquired on the first visit there) and some money for copies, I went to the secure reading room to pick up the envelopes and settled at a comfortable desk to read and copy records. Papers in the files included information about the soldiers and their families from neighbors, friends, doctors, fellow soldiers from those long-gone days, and the applicant too of course. Reading them was a spiritual event.

Civil War pension records are a fraction of what’s there, of course, but they’re not available anywhere else. While pension papers for soldiers of the Revolution are now available on Footnote.com, such records for those who served in the Civil War and War of 1812 are not.

Library of Congress:  After registering for our “reader cards,” we attended an LC orientation session and spent the majority of our time there in the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room. While satisfying for sure, we were just nibbling at the edges of offerings on that menu.

The LC catalog is on the Internet, of course, and it goes on forever, since it has just about everything ever published in the USA—or close to it. Time spent on the on-line LC catalog before arrival there is a good investment.

NSDAR Library: Here I thought I’d prepared reasonably well at home using the library’s catalog on line. But I found it hard to work methodically once I could meander through the open stacks midst vast numbers of family histories, local histories and periodicals. There, also, was that immense collection of DAR-generated records—copies of everything the society has collected and published over the years—and much of it searchable on the library’s computers.

What a week! It was pleasurable travel with friends to libraries offering glorious possibilities. Perhaps Washington—along with Salt Lake City, Fort Wayne and Boston—would be a good destination for a future CGS group research trip.

Photograph courtesy of Shirley Thomson, 3/16/2010, Washington, D.C.