Genealogy Journal - 12/18/07

I was able to make a little progress today on my own research in addition to blogging a bit.

The morning started at 8:30 with reading email and Bloglines. I posted my Christmas Shopping article for the Advent carnival, then quickly read the Carnival of Genealogy and posted about it too.

We left at about 9:45 for the Bill Russo memorial service at church. Whenever I hear families talk about their loved ones, I think "there is absolutely no way that a genealogist 50 or 100 years from now will ever know about any of this unless someone writes it down." And "our efforts trying to find family history is pretty difficult unless there is a great obituary in the newspaper or an article in a county history book." It was a nice service, and reception following, and we got home at 1 PM.

I got back on the computer, and wrote my post "Santa Comes Early - what a gift!" about my unexpected reception of the Ranslow Smith report in the mail yesterday. Then it was off to post my NFL picks for this week on the Randy's Busy Life blog, plus two more articles there. I decided to summarize the 38 responses for our CVGS meeting day survey, and that took a good hour. I sent it off to the CVGS board for comment. That took me up close to 4:30, and I figured I'd better do some of my chores, so I helped Linda a bit with wrapping, and then read the paper before dinner.

After dinner I came back to the computer and read my email and Bloglines. I read some of the Ranslow Report again, and decided to search the census records for Russell Smith, the purported father of Ranslow, George and Lyman Smith (according to Lyman and George's obituaries which I don't have yet), who was supposed to be in Oneida County NY in the 1800 to 1820 time period. I found him in 1800 in Western township, and in 1814 there also in a list. I went to the Oneida County NY USGenWeb site and found it is really well done. I checked the book transcripts, the Bible transcripts, the Cemetery listings for Rome and Western, and the Queries. No success. Then I used the Search box for the web site and hit pay dirt - a book chapter for Lee town says that David smith and his sons David and Russell settled in Western in about 1790, in the part that became Lee. A possible match! OK, let's see if I can find any of these guys in the Rootsweb WorldConnect database - nope! Drat. The LDS FamilySearch? Nope - drat again. The book mentions a number of families that came from Rhode Island in the 1790 time period, I'll have to track them that way and sneak up on Russell's mother's name.

Genealogy today - only 6.0 hours total, of which 1.0 hour was reading email and Bloglines, 2.0 hours was blogging, 1.0 hour was CVGS business, and 2.0 hours was doing fun research.

I'm leaving on Wednesday to Santa Cruz and probably won't be back online until Friday. I did prepare several posts which i'll put up on Wednesday morning before I leave.