Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Family History Journal - 03/04/08

I spent just about all day slaving over a smoking keyboard... typing, not playing music.

The day started at 8:30 a.m., with reading email and reading blogs, although bloglines was problematic for awhile. I posted "Descendants of Samuel and Mary Ann (Underhill) Vaux - Post 6" on Genea-Musings while waiting for Bloglines to heal itself - it did. Then I posted "43rd Carnival of Genealogy has 32 Submissions" soon after. Marna wanted me to look at the new SDGS web site and comment on it, so I did - I really like the look and content, and told her so. I'm trying to put together a short Beginners Guide for our new members, so I went looking for all of the forms I've made over the years. I edited them to add up-to-date web sites and links, and when I looked up it was noon time.

After a quixk lunch (soup and GS cookies), I answered several emails of CVGS queryists and sent scans of obituaries to two people. I listened to the latest Genealogy Guys podcast while doing this - multi-tasking! I received an email this morning from Legacy Family Tree about a free trial period for Legacy Charting. I downloaded it, installed it and imported an FTM file and it didn't work well. I wrote a nasty-gram to Legacy and then uploaded a GEDCOM of another database and that worked great, so it must have been my raw FTM file. I got a quick response that said to "compact" my FTM file and try again, and this time it worked, so there was something wrong with my FTM file. I posted my observations with some screen shots in "Using FREE Legacy Charting Pre-release Edition" on Genea-Musings, and had to edit it later. Then it was nap time and paper reading because Linda came home and needed the computer for awhile.

After dinner, I was back on at 6 p.m., and did some research on the "Cousin Mida" Vroman families I found the other day. I exercised the California BMD indexes a bit and found quite a few dates for many of Almeda's descendants. In every family, it seems like there is tragedy - a child dies, a wife dies, a baby is orphaned, etc. I input all of that info into my FTM database. Then I chased other Underhill lines on WorldConnect - my cousin Alison Pligman has done a nice job on her side of the Underhill family. I printed off several lines, and input them to my database which didn't have them before for some reason. Gee, it's 10 p.m. now - I'd better stop.

Genealogy today was 11.0 hours - reading and answering email was 2.5 hours, reading blogs was 1.5 hours, working on the forms was 2.0 hours, working with Legacy Charting was 1.0 hour, and researching the Underhill/Vaux cousins was 4.0 hours.

Tomorrow is a busy day - we have the CVGS Board meeting and I need to deliver flyers, among other things. I've been forgetting to post on the Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe blog and I need to do that too, plus write my newsletter articles for the month. Always some - idle hands are the devil's tools, they say.

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