Genealogy Journal - 01/29/08

I worked on genealogy almost all day - taking a short break for lunch, another before dinner, and another to set my wife's new cell phone up this evening. Did I accomplish anything? The jury is out, I think!

I was reading my email and Bloglines at 8:30 AM, and posted my John Richman biography on Genea-Musings before I left at 10 AM for the FHC. I had three films at the FHC, and I read all three - one was will abstracts for Oneida county NY, 1790-1885 or so - and I found all of the Smith's...but not one for David or Russell smith - drat! I also read the two films with the deed index (grantor and grantee) for Smith - lots of deeds! There were some for David smith, and some for Russell and Esther Smith - so there may be some leads when I order the actual deeds on film. I got nauseous watching the film go by - I had to close my eyes, put my head down and put my hand in front of the machine while I rewound it. Then I copied the early Smith deed indexes onto my flash drive using the microfilm scanner/printer computer system. I left at about 1 PM, and was home by 1:30.

I posted the NGS Quarterly table of contents for the latest issue, and made some comments about several articles. Then I made the programs for the CVGS meeting on Wednesday, and the flyers for February. I'll take them to the copy shop, along with Shirley's handout, to make copies tomorrow.

After dinner, I messed around for most of the evening. I Googled for David smith a bit, and then searched WorldConnect for David, Russell and Arnold Smiths from RI, with no real success. WorldConnect and OneWorldTree don't have any useful family trees for my known Wade, Hawkins, Smith families... I decided to look for the genealogy and historical societies in Oneida County NY and found them, but there is not much decent online besides the USGenWeb site for Oneida County. They have listings for many cemeteries. I checked out Google Maps for Oneida and Jefferson counties to try to get a feel for settlements and the geography, but some of that area has not been mapped.

Genealogy today totalled about 8.0 hours - reading email and Bloglines was 1.0 hour, blogging was 1.5 hours, searching at the FHC was 2.5 hours, CVGS activities was 1.0 hour, and uselessly searching databases was 2.0 hours.