Thursday, February 28, 2008

Family History Journal - 02/28/08

Today was a fairly full genealogy day...with breaks only for eating, napping and doing honey-dos.

I was on the computer by 8:30 a.m., reading my email and Bloglines. I posted the first in a series about "Descendants of Samuel and Mary Ann (Underhill) Vaux" from a genealogy report I made the other day. Then I posted "Ancestry's New Look and Search Capabilities" based on the Ancestry blog post and my own research. Then it was off to the San Diego Family History Center for the rest of the morning.

At the FHC, I transferred images from the Providence RI Probate Records and Oneida County (NY) Deeds that I found last week on microfilm to my flash drive using the Canon Microfilm Scanner system. I had to play around with the brightness and contrast on the scanner because the deeds were very little writing. Then it was on the FHC computers - several of them wouldn't let me access the Premium Databases. I didn't find much useful on WorldVitalRecords for the Munger, Doctor and Vaux surnames. I dropped my flyers on the counter and came home.

I was home by about 12:30 p.m., and after lunch I transferred the images from the flash drive to my hard drive and renamed the files appropriately. I decided to do another survey of the genealogy web sites with the most traffic, and wrote "Genealogy web site traffic" to document my findings. I did a bit more testing of the new Ancestry interface. Linda was home and needed to use the computer so I read the paper, took a nap, and watched TV before dinner.

At 6:30 p.m., I was back on reading email and blogs, and answered several emails from CVGS folks. I started in again on my pile of census data that needs to be input to my database, and worked that until about 9:30. I'm still not done - lots more to do!

Genealogy today was 9.5 hours - reading email and blogs was 1.5 hours, blogging (including the research time) was 2.5 hours, researching at the FHC was 2.0 hours, transferring data to my computer was 1.0 hour, testing Ancestry's interface was 0.5 hours, and working in my FTM database was 2.0 hours.

I need to start working on my presentation for 5 April and catch up on the RI probate records in addition to putting the Vaux family material in my database.

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