Monday, January 28, 2008

Genealogy Journal - 01/28/08

Looking back on the day, it seems like I didn't get much accomplished.

I was on the computer by 8:30 AM, reading my email and then Bloglines. I polished up my post on "My Family History Genealogy Parade Float" and posted it on Genea-Musings, then I decided I had better burn down my email list. I have about 15 requests for information from my Ancestry Personal Member Trees. I printed each of them out, then went into my databases and made genealogy reports for each of them, saving them to my hard drive. Then I started answering the emails and attaching a report to the email. I got about half of them sent, and my email list is burned down a bit. Then it was lunch time and after that I went to the library for our regular Monday "table talk" session.

Dearl was holding down the fort at the library, and a couple from Colorado were busy looking at books in our genealogy collection. They have several one-name studies going as their life's work, and had an excellent system of finding data, abstracting it and eventually incorporating it into their database. Shirley came by with her laptop and showed us her NY state research presentation for comments - looked great to me. I got home by 2:30 PM.

I decided to post "Finding Cousins through Ancestry Member Trees" on Genea-Musings based on my morning efforts. Then I remembered that I needed to close out our financial records for 2007, so I did that for almost two hours. Then it was news time, dinner time, and I watched the SOTU before coming back to the computer.

I wondered if Juliana Smith had a summary for 1808 so that I could add it to my posts about "Where were they in 1808" and she didn't ... but when I Googled [1808 events] I found that Wikipedia has a page for every year and every day of the year. What a great collection of historical data (assuming it's correct...). So I read that stuff for over an hour and posted "What happened on this day, or that year?" Lastly, I updated my post about the 1940 census to add the procedure to obtain the Bill Dollarhide census book.

Hmm, I still haven't advanced the ball at all on my own research today! So I looked for info on Simon Wade and Phebe Horton on Google, Ancestry and WorldConnect - what I found was most of the submitted data reference my web page. Arggh. I give up for tonight. Tomorrow I'll go to the FHC and hopefully get some Russell Smith information.

Genealogy today was 7.5 hours - 1.0 hours was reading email and Bloglines, 1.0 hour was making genealogy reports and sending them out, 2.0 hours was blogging, 1.5 hours was CVGS related, and 1.0 hour was reading in Wikipedia and 1.0 hour was working in Ancestry/WC.

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