Tuesday Tales From the Road - Salt Lake City

Imagine going on the genealogy trip of a lifetime - weeks spent traveling the country with nary a family or work commitment - just loads of time to spend searching for ancestors. Sound like a dream?

It is a dream-come-true for CGS member, Mary Mettler, who is on a three-and-a-half month trek from Salt Lake City to Vermont, with stops in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington D.C., Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts along the way. The best news is that Mary offered to send some reports so we can share in her adventure. This is Mary's first installment:

I am finishing up my very short three days in Salt Lake City. I knew I had a 2nd great-granduncle and a 2nd great-grandaunt, who were Mormons. I decided to do a little digging on my ancestor's siblings. Wow, six Farnsworths were Mormons, while my 2nd Great-Grandfather, Reuben Farnsworth remained a staunch Congregationalist. Philo Taylor Farnsworth was the first one to make the trip to Utah in 1848 and rose to become a Bishop. His son, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, Jr. was the inventor of the television. As he was plowing the field in Utah one day, he looked at the rows and thought he might be able to transmit pictures by using multiple lines.

In 1852, Stephen Martindale Farnsworth and his family and Laura Farnsworth Frampton Owen and her son, William Frampton, made the journey. Stephen was one of the "captains" of the wagon train - a leader of ten families. Moses Franklin Farnsworth and two other sisters followed. Moses rose to become a High Priest and also wrote the definitive book on the Farnsworths, The Farnsworth Memorial II. His autobiography was in a book in the Family History Library (FHL), while Laura had one in the Church Archives. Turns out the Church Archives are in the Mormon Office Building, a few blocks from the FHL. To my delight, I was allowed access to her original document because I was a descendant. I now have a much greater appreciation of what the early Mormon pioneers went through. If any CGS members have any Mormons in their family, here is a Web site which will give you quite a bit of detail: http://www.lds.org/churchhistory/library/pioneercompanysearch/. This site covers all the early pioneers who came to Utah.

On a lighter note, I want to share a couple of "secrets" in Salt Lake City for walkers and runners. Although there are parks all around the temple, I have some favorites close by. If you walk up North Temple Street along Temple Square, take the fork to the left and take a left on Canyon Road. On the left is City Creek Park and on the right is the part of it with the creek flowing through. It has a couple of picnic tables if you want to bring your lunch and review your findings. For you morning runners or walkers, continue up Canyon Road to a second park, Memory Grove Park, a long narrow park that runs up the Canyon. It is a wonderful run or power walk and a great way to start the morning. Even though the days were in the 90's, my runs at 6:30 a.m. were at 65 degrees.

I'm off to Wyoming tomorrow on my way to my next genealogy stop in Rock Island, Cordova and Morrison, Illinois. Hopefully, the Mississippi River has settled down a bit. I have my hiking shoes for walking through muddy graveyards!

Your Roving Reporter,

Mary Mettler

Read the entire series:
Part One: Salt Lake City
Part Two: Indiana
Part Three: Pennsylvania
Part Four: More From Pennsylvania
Part Five: Washington D.C.
Part Six: Suffield, Connecticut
Part Seven: Vermont
Part Eight: Dorset, Vermont
Part Nine: West Point and Back to Pennsylvania
Part Ten: Some Final Thoughts From Home

Picked By One of the Best

Each week several genealogy bloggers select their favorite posts from the blogosphere and link to them. It is a great way to support the genea-blogging community and is a helpful resource for readers to find new blogs and catch good reads.

The California Genealogical Society and Library blog was picked by Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings two times in the last month. His Best of the Genea-Blogs - June 22-28, 2008 featured Finding Cousins in the Library and Best of the Genea-Blogs - July 13-19, 2008 included In Case You Missed "A Day of Irish Information."

I met Randy and his lovely wife, Linda, at the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in Burbank last month. Randy is a retired aerospace engineer who easily takes the prize as the most prolific genea-blogger. Besides posting several times a day to his blogs (he authors four!), Randy is also the president of the Chula Vista Genealogical Society.

Randy always prefaces his picks with this:

Several hundred genealogy and family history bloggers write thousands of posts every week about their research, their families, and their interests. I appreciate each one of them and their efforts.

My criteria for "Best of ..." are pretty simple - I pick posts that advance knowledge about genealogy and family history, address current genealogy issues, provide personal family history, are funny or are poignant. I don't list posts destined for the Carnival of Genealogy, or other meme submissions (but I do include summaries of them), or my own posts.

Thanks, Randy, for the honor!

Genealogy Best Bet Web Sites - September 13, 2008

September Membership Meeting

Saturday, September 13, 2008
1:00 p.m.
California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway at 22nd, Oakland.

Best Bet Web sites for Genealogical Research

Genealogist and author Ron Arons will explore the many "best bet" Web sites that allow researchers to find materials online, including historical documents, newspapers and articles, living people, maps and photos, foreign language translators and aids and more. He will provide numerous examples of how the Internet has worked for him.

Ron will also slip in some tales from his new book, The Jews of Sing Sing, described as "the true story of Jewish gangsters and other shady characters who served time 'up the river' and the New York Jewish community’s response." His interest in Jewish inmates started when he discovered that his great-grandfather served four years at the famous prison. Be sure to read Dick Eastman's glowing review of Ron's book and watch Dick's interview with Ron for RootsTelevision.

Ron Arons has earned degrees from Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and is a member of both the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. Arons has traced his roots to England, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. A recipient of the 2005 Hackman Research Residency Award, his current research focuses on both famous and lesser-known Jewish criminals.

Please note that the short membership meeting starts promptly at 1:00 p.m. Ron's talk follows at 1:30 p.m. He will be available afterwards to autograph and sell books.

Report on the First 24 Hours of the Mortuary Indexing Project

Rose Pierson of FamilySearch Indexing sent some statistics on the San Francisco Mortuary Project. She will be sending reports weekly.

The project includes 38,837 total images in 3,883 total batches.

After 24 hours:

814 total images have been indexed (81 batches)
1560 images checked out for A indexing (156 batches)
1140 images checked out for B indexing (114 batches)

I found time to process a couple of batches. The records were from 1895 (pre-earthquake!) and included one child who died at age 8 of tubercular meningitis. With the missing 1890 census, this is a child who never appeared in a U.S. census. The record gave her mother's name, another name that may be a sister and a note that she was placed in a vault in May 1895 and shipped to Albuquerque, New Mexico the next January (1896). Good stuff!

S.F. Mortuary Records Rise From the Dead

In a cooperative effort with SFgenealogy.com, the San Francisco Public Library, the Genealogical Society of Utah and FamilySearch Indexing, the California Genealogical Society is pleased to announce the start of the San Francisco Mortuary Records Indexing Project. The project is the culmination of two years' work by the entities involved, to bring the digital images of thousands of mortuary records, stored by the Halsted Gray Mortuary in San Francisco, to researchers all over the world. The records are a significant genealogical find because of the richness of their detail and the miraculous way they survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

The records include the complete holdings of the first mortuary in San Francisco, undertakers N. Gray & Co., from the day it opened - July 1, 1850. In all, the project includes the surviving records, up to 1920, of several mortuaries that merged with either Halsted or Gray, over the years. The records include notations from financial ledgers, cemetery records, removal records and headstone notations. Many have obituary clippings.

Rose Pierson of Family Search Indexing has been working diligently to ready the project for volunteers. The CGS project is now listed on the Current Projects page (scroll down to the bottom and look for the CGS logo.)

The Project Home Page gives three digital examples of how the records look and has a link to project-specific indexing instructions. Please take advantage of the training tutorials located under the "Help" tab.

I'll have more to say about the project in the coming days and I will report on my own indexing experience. (I did some beta testing and I guarantee you will be thrilled with the kind of information you will find.) I encourage everyone to use the comments section at the bottom of this post to let us know about your experience in the project.

Report On the First 24 Hours - July 22, 2008

Update - Friday, August 1, 2008


Update - February 11, 2011. Watch the YouTube video about our project!