Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Genies Minutes for May 17, 2021

 

Present were: Bill R., Peggy V., Rick B., Linda L., Linda B., Sherry J., Denis H., Barbara B, David R., Frank, Margie, Elizabeth D., Judy S., Judith C. and Sylvia.

Reminder of upcoming meetings:

Genies German Group, June 1st.  Request a zoom invitation if you would like to come.

Genies Monthly Meeting, June 21st at 1:00 by Zoom

In July Judith will be attending a conference and won’t be in attendance. Bill R. will be the Zoom host.

Peggy V: A librarian in Delafied, WI provided some clues for her research on her Murphy-Brown ancestors. They were from the Irish Free State. Not sure about finding records in Ireland, as a fire destroyed many. David R. suggested working with parish records which were not affected by fire.

BILL R is using Adobe LightRoom Classic to deal with images. He took a Zoom class at Whatcom Community College to learn about it. Now he knows how to import/tag images. The program has many applications.

RICK is enjoying using Family Search. He is categorizing members on FS and so far has found over 200 with additional information such as birthdays and other recorded information.

[Judith: FS is the best place site for us to archive our information. The Mormon church is dedicated to collecting and archiving records from the past, present and will continue to do so well into the future, and is the most likely site for our descendants to have access to our family histories.]

DENIS is researching his ancestors from Germany. Some moved to Albany, NY. There is a website and books on his German ancestral name. There is even a mountain named for the family in Whatcom County.

ELIZABETH is still working on the interlibrary loan book and history of Newbury County, N. Carolina. She is finding lots of history. She says from all her research she has learned it is hard to be a pioneer settling in a new place. There are so many challenges.

JUDY S wants to contact Elizabeth regarding her S. Carolina ancestors.

FRANK & MARGIE mentioned a free webinar on Eastern Europe. Frank’s Baltimore family came from Eastern Europe and he is using Ancestry to find out the name of the ship they came on.

DAVID is keeping his records with Family Search because they are the best place to store them. Your tree can go up on FS as a private tree which only you can edit, or as part of the collaborative “Family Search Family Tree” in which anyone can add or change the tree. This enables you to get notifications about who has changed what, and you can do your own editing.   {Judith: This is done by following each person you want to be notified about.  In the Person view on the right side across from the person’s name, click on Follow.]

BARBARA is working her way through German church records to learn about her ancestors. She has attended lots of webinars on Zoom. She says she has a high percentage of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, possibly meaning someone as recent as a grandparent, and is trying to find out who as there does not appear to be any family information for that ethnicity.

LINDA L watched a webinar on Ships’ Passenger Lists and has found a lot of useful information. People were often criminalized and deported for minor infractions of the law. She has also found that ArchiveGrid is a very useful collection of archived material from WorldCat.

LINDA B is working on ancestors from Prussia and finding records to corroborate her own records. She has also found that the Milwaukee church where her ancestors attended has a website. She intends to write to them and find out where they keep their parish records.

SHERRY is using Family Locket and Evernote to keep a research log. She wants a more permanent record-keeping system stored on her own computer rather than with one of the sites such as Ancestry which may not be permanent. She is also researching her German ancestors using a genealogy group for Eastern European Jewish ancestry.

SYLVIA has had a breakthrough of sorts in identifying her paternal family side. A new DNA mystery 3rd cousin appears to belong to the maternal side of that tree, while another mystery 3rd cousin is linked to the paternal side. Using shared matches color-coded by family line, she will now be able to determine which shared matches are on which side of the family, and what are the family names and locations of their ancestors. She also watched a seminar by Diahann Southard on finding mystery cousins, where she learned tips on how to identify them and their relationship to you.

FURTHER INFORMATION AND BUSINESS

Judith watched a talk by Stephen P. Morse. His website https://stevemorse.org/index.html is called One Step Webpages with extensive tools and tricks for finding and accessing records of all kinds.  He began with an emphasis on immigration but has now expanded to include anything that interests him.

Find-A-Grave now has a new monthly newsletter you can sign up for.

Judith says Google’s Blogger and Feedburner are discontinuing the feature to send blogposts to email addresses.  We have been using this to send out our blogposts.  Update: Bill is setting up a Google Group where we can all post items of interest and the Minutes too, directly to the site.  The Blog currently has 60 email addresses. Everyone will be moved over to the new group in the next month.  If you receive a message to confirm membership, please respond.

NEXT MEETING: June 21st, 2021    1:00 pm via Zoom

 

 

 

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