Monday, March 24, 2008

Genealogy Journal - 03/24/08

This was an interesting genealogy day... interrupted by an abortive shopping trip to buy my wife an anniversary gift.

I was on the computer soon after 8 a.m., and read my email and Bloglines. I posted "'English Research' is CVGS Program on March 26" on Genea-Musings. I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how Kory Meyerink ranked the 50 top genealogy web sites and I think I figured it out. I made a list of Kory's 50, then used Quantcast to determine the reach, then checked Alexa. I compared Kory's list to my earlier list, and found that I missed quite a few of his top 50. Oh well. I exercised Alexa.com a bit more and found I could compare Ancestry with Rootsweb and other sites, so I played with that for awhile, saving the graphs.

At 10:30, I took off for Costco and Walmart to look for jewelry for my Angel Linda. What a bust. I did get flowers at Costco - two dozen roses for $14.95 - a great deal! I had a Polish dog there for lunch. At 12 noon, I was at the library, looked in on Shirley's class, and joined John and Dearl at the weekly table talk. I read the new Everton's GH too. I headed for the shopping center and struck out again - not what I want, too expensive, etc. I was home by 2 pm.

I checked email and Bloglines again, then posted "Ancestry and Rootsweb Traffic" on Genea-Musings. I posted about Santa Cruz and several funnies on Randy's Busy Life, then answered some email. One emailer had found my web page and helpfully suggested I could find more English ancestry of Joseph Clark of Dedham MA in the January 1998 issue of NEHGR. I dug it out and input the excellent data into my FTM database. By this time, it was 5 p.m., so I went in and read the paper, took a brief nap, and we had dinner, then watched the news a bit.

I was back on the computer at 7 pm. and decided I'd better get my April 5 presentation in hand. I moved some things around to make the flow better, removed some duplication, added more pictures and document images with labels, and have it now almost ready to go. I need to caption some pictures, add a summary chart and run through it again for content, typos, flow and interest. I checked my email and Bloglines and wrote this post. I'm done.

Genealogy today was 9.5 hours - 1.0 hour with email, 1.0 hour with Bloglines, 1.5 hours blogging, 1.5 hours researching the Top 50, 1.0 at the library with CVGS, 1.0 hour adding data to my database, and 2.5 hours working on my presentation.

We've decided to gift ourselves with another weekend away from home - we're off to Disneyland (again) next weekend - we'll meet Lolo and her parents on Sunday for fun at the Magic Kingdom. Angle Linda loved the roses - there are enough that she can share them with shut-ins and friends.

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