Genealogy Journal - 1/1/08

This was a day of general sloth, genealogy research and computer frustration, in the main. After I got up late, and had breakfast, I read some of the paper and watched part of the Rose Parade and the Michigan/Florida football game. It was 11 AM by the time I got on the computer.

After reading my email (the mailing lists had a lot more entries today!) and Bloglines, I posted "My Greatest Genealogy Find Ever" on Genea-Musings. That done, and being hungry (again), I went in and had lunch and watched the rest of the Michigan/Florida game, which morphed into the USC/Illinois game because I dozed off in my chair just before 2 PM. Roused from my nap at about 3:30, I came into the computer again and read my email and Bloglines again. Then I worked a bit finding David Smith (darn surname!) in the Military databases on Ancestry - he was a Captain or Major from Waterbury in the Connecticut line during the RevWar. There was nothing that summarized his service, only name, rank, and muster date. Frustrating - need to check Footnote resources, I guess. Then I checked the DAR database hoping to find something useful about David Smith, him being an officer and all. More frustration - that search system is hard to use. I looked for David Smith's who lived in Waterbury CT in the WorldConnect database and found none. By now, the Hawaii/Georgia game was on and then it was dinner time.

After dinner, I came to the computer again and decided to look in the Barbour collection of Connecticut Vital Records pre-1870 to see if I could find some children of David Smith of Waterbury/Watertown/Plymouth CT. There were four (Aaron (1771), David (1776), Junius (1780) and Lucius (1784) ) from the 1770-1790 period in Watertown CT born to David and Ruth Smith (now I have a wife's given name - no record of a David Smith marrying a Ruth in the Marriage records, though). Googling these names, I found books mentioning that Aaron and Junius were sons of Major David Smith of Waterbury CT. Then I went through the 1790 census, and identified the Smith's in Watertown in Litcfield county CT (Plymouth did not exist yet). I also checked the LDS FHLC for David Smith and Watertown/Waterbury works - some interesting things there. Finally, I decided to post a note on Genea-Musings summarizing my Russell Smith data from yesterday's search, and I was halfway through the post when Internet Explorer shutdown on me - argggh - I hate when that happens - darnit! I think Blogger saved most of it, though -- I haven't looked. I rebooted the computer, went in to do the dishes, came back and logged back on to write this post, and decided I'd wait until tomorrow to finish the Russell Smith post.

Genealogy today - 6.0 hours at most - including 1.0 hour reading email and Bloglines, 1.0 hour blogging, and 4.0 hours doing my Smith research.