Monday, January 14, 2008

Genealogy Journal - 01/14/08

I seemed to spend a lot of time doing genealogy things today, but really got little accomplished.

I was on the computer by 8:30 AM, and posted the "Elusive Russell Smith - Post 5" timeline on Genea-Musings. Then I worked for over an hour filling out my other forms for Russell Smith - the Research Summary form and the Online Research form. Now I'm a bit better organized with those three forms filled out and ready to be written on. I got to thinking about how researchers and societies should share information, so I wrote "Working Together Really Works." The post kind of morphed from extolling online researchers to work and connect with traditional researchers to what societies should and could do to communicate with, consult with and educate their members. It probably should have been two posts. Then it was lunch time ... and I went off to the pharmacy, bank and library.

I got to the library at about 12:10 PM for our Monday "table talk" session - just Dearl and I today. I had a chance to read some of the latest Everton's Genealogical Helper magazine. I headed home at 1:15 after checking to see that there were enough of the CVGS flyers in the display box. I read my email and Bloglines, then decided to burn down my email list a bit - I sent 6 off. Then I read some political news sites, got sleepy and went into the family room for my nap. Linda was on the computer, so it was 4:30 by the time I got back on. I posted "The Year was 1916 - Chula Vista isolated" about Hatfield the Rainmaker and the consequences of toying with Mother Nature. My hook here was that historical societies may have interesting articles about historical events that may help explain what your ancestors experienced, or how or why your ancestor moved somewhere else. Dinner time.

At 6:30 PM, I was back at it, and decided to fill in the "Online Resources" form by doing controlled searches for Russell Smith in various databases - I went to WorldConnect, Rootsweb Mailing Lists, USGenWeb Archives, Rootsweb MetaSearch and SearchThingy, the Genforum Message Boards, WeRelate.org and MyHeritage.com tonight. I'll do the rest later. The results? No luck at all - no matches that I haven't already seen.I probably should write a post on Genea-Musings listing the databases I routinely search for ancestors. I also went to the Carlsbad library databases genealogy page to look at PERSI for Russell smith and Oneida County NY articles. I got sidetracked by the new link to NewspaperARCHIVE on the database page, so I tried that out. Like HQO, it requires a Carlsbad library card, which I have. I posted on the Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe blog about the Carlsbad databases. Then I looked at PERSI and found a lot of articles about Oneida County - most of them in two periodicals.

Genealogy today was 8.5 hours - 1.5 hours dealing with email and Bloglines, 2.0 hours blogging, 1.5 hours at the library, 1.0 hour creating research forms, 2.5 hours looking at online databases for RS.

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