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author Ron Arons will explore the many "best bet" Web sites that allow researchers to find materials online, including historical documents, newspapers and articles, living people, maps and photos, foreign language translators and aids and more.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!

Lorna's Report From the Alameda County Fair

CGS member Lorna Wallace helped staff the Alameda County Fair Genealogy Booth again this year and sent this report:

The Livermore-Amador Valley Genealogical Society (L-AGS) has sponsored a genealogy booth at the Alameda County Fair for the last few years. It is located in the large, air-conditioned (very important on hot summer days) “Technology Building”, where other computer-related attractions are going on. The booth features three computer stations with connections to several subscription databases (Ancestry, VitalRecords-CA and Footnote) for demonstrating the powerful search products that are now available. There is also a helpful handout listing many of the big, free sites, like Cyndislist.

There are two types of volunteers staffing the booth: “greeters” encourage visitors to mark their places of birth on large mounted maps of the U.S. and the world, and to fill out pedigree charts. “Researchers” then try to find an ancestors using the computer resources. Some visitors sit down at the computer and think their family history is just sitting in there, waiting to pop up on the screen. Some have been trying to use the Internet, but have not discovered basic sites such as Rootsweb or FamilySearch. Then there were those who actually brought notes so they could use their time well. Several used their cell phones to call relatives, right on the spot, to get a piece of missing information.

I think the biggest challenge for us, the volunteers, is the fact that we are presented with a whole segment of our community that are not well represented in the usual population of genealogical society membership. We come face-to-face with people from all over the world, especially Latin America and Asia, who want to know how to research their ancestry in their home county. The L-AGS is doing a good job of trying to find and provide resources.

Genealogists have so much to share. I encourage all of the members of the California Genealogical Society to volunteer next year when the Fair returns in late June of 2009.

Lorna Wallace is an active volunteer on the CGS Book Repair and Desk Duty Committees. She also handles book mailings for the society. Thanks for the report, Lorna, and for representing the society so well.

Photographs courtesy of Duncan Tanner.