Saturday, November 15, 2008

Genealogy Journal - 11/15/08

What a great genealogy day - I went to the CGSSD meeting, actually advanced the ball in my ancestral database, read some interesting articles, and posted some blogs.

I was up early, and read my email and blogs before I had to go off to my men's breakfast in National City at 8 a.m. I had set Test Drive of Family Historian 3.1 - Post 1 to be posted this morning. I left NC at 9:05 full of eggs, bacon, pancakes and scripture, and headed for UCSD, arriving at 9:35 a.m. at the CGSSD meeting place. I left there and headed home at 12:20 p.m.

When I got home, I read email but Bloglines was down, so I checked Facebook instead. I posted "Unclaimed Trains" case in San Diego about a local newspaper article. I've been meaning to work in my database creating sources for the birth, marriage and death dates/places for many persons. I decided to start with some of my Massachusetts families - I have notations like (MA VR 35:236) and (VR, 77) in some of my place fields - these are shorthand for (Massachusetts Vital Records, 1841-1910, Volume 35, page 236) and (Vital Records, page 77) which relate to a specific town or county. I probably have several thousand people with notations like this in my Master database, and I need to get them into my Source field and out of my Place field if I'm every going to publish anything worthwhile. I found that I could quickly add Sources and page citations, and delete shorthand items, by working in a family, since most births, marriages and deaths all occurred in the same town. I worked on this until 3:40 p.m., when I thought I would go in and take a nap. I didn't take a nap, but I did watch TV and we had dinner and I watched some of the SDSU-Utah game (up until it was 21-7, it ended 63-14)..

I was back on the computer by 6:30, and worked for another hour doing the source work. I estimate I worked on over 300 people. That's great - only anouther 20,400 to go - but they all don't have these shorthand citations - probably about 5,000 do. The rest don't have any sources at all, unfortunately!
At 7:30, I stopped and wrote CGSSD Meeting report about this morning's meeting at UCSD. I worked on Facebook for awhile, checked the Unclaimed Persons report #49, and then downloaded the Everton's magazine for Nov-Dec 2008 and read the first 90 pages of it. I checked Bloglines, and finally some posts came through, but I think it is constipated again. Finally, this post.

Genealogy today was 9.5 hours - 0.5 hour doing email, 0.5 hour reading blogs, 2.0 hours writing blog posts, 2.5 hours at CGSSD meeting, 3.0 hours doing sources in my database, and 1.0 hour reading Everton's magazine.

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