Saturday, May 31, 2008

Genealogy Journal - 05/31/08

I closed out the month of May with an all-day session of doing useful and fun genealogy research and activities.

We had our monthly Dolphin club breakfast (these are Linda's swim buddies who don't swim any more - they just meet for breakfast each month now) at Carrow's at 7 a.m., but I was home by 8:30 a.m. and stayed home the rest of the day.

After reading email and blogs, I posted "Book Report: Death on the Family Tree" which has had quite a few comments already with suggestions for other books with a genealogy bent. I've been putting off extracting information from all of the Russell smith deeds in Oneida County NY for awhile, so I added data from the five deeds into his Notes in my FTM database. I then added everything else I know about him, and his father, to their Notes as well. This took me up to noon time, and after lunch I posted "The Elusive Russell Smith - Post 7" to summarize the deed results.

My newly found Richmond second cousin once removed (2C1R) emailed me again with material found by a researcher in England, confirming some of the data I have on the Wiltshire Richman and Rich lines, and suggesting parents for both John Richman (1788-1867) and John Rich (1793-1868). I found all of my notes from 1993-1995 about these families, consulted my databases, and sent my 2C1R more information, including all of the extractions I made from the parish registers for the surnames. These don't prove parentage for either man ... although I have my suspicions for both, and for Ann Marshman's parents too! It was good to take a fresh look at this data, but I still don't see any clear and convincing proof of parentage. I also found an updated database on WorldConnect for this Richman line, so I added some data to my database. Paula at SCGS asked if they could publish my "LearnWebSkills" article from Genea-Musings in the SCGS magazine, so I edited it a bit and sent it off to her.

I thought it was dinner time at 5, so I went in to watch TV and read the paper and wait for Linda to wake up from her nap. At 6:15, we finally ate, and I went out and watered the front flowers and pulled some weeds just to do something useful around the house today. I was back on the computer at 7 p.m. and decided to add some Seaver families to my FTM database from the 1930 census. I picked states and determined if I had the 1930 census data already in the database. If not, and if I already had the person in my database, I added the information for about 15 families in 2.5 hours. Then it was time for the weekly Wheel of Genealogy Fortune post and this post, and I'm done for the night.

Genealogy today was 11.0 hours - 0.5 hour reading email, 0.5 hour reading blogs, 1.5 hours writing blog posts, 3.5 hours working on the Russell Smith deeds, 2.5 hours working on the Richman stuff, and 2.5 hours working on the Seaver database. Look at that - I did over 8 hours of pretty useful activities as opposed to reading and writing all day! I feel good about today! I even saved gas by not going anywhere!

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