Friday, February 4, 2011

Busy Genealogy Weekend

The New York Evening Call
Sometimes everything just seems to happen at once!  My life has been jam-packed with genealogy starting on Thursday and it's continuing through Sunday.

Thursday I was at the Oakland Public Library studying Socialist newspapers from 1911, looking for information about a young woman who died due to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  What I was hoping to find was mention of a family member, because while I'm pretty sure the girl who died is the same as the person in the family I am researching, I want better documentation than what I currently have.  Unfortunately, as can often happen in genealogy, the hoped-for information wasn't there.  I'm starting to run out of places to look.

Friday was the first day of a two-day meeting organized by the Santa Clara County Historical and Genealogical Society and the California State Genealogical Alliance.  CSGA had a combined board and annual meeting in the morning, and in the afternoon attendees received a tour of the genealogy collection at the Santa Clara (City) Central Park Library, where the meeting was held.  SCCHGS has an arrangement with the library and houses its collection there, and the library also has genealogy books and periodicals.  Local History Librarian Mary Hanel gave our group an overview of the collection, which has a strong focus on Santa Clara County and California.  The collection includes such things as microfilms of San Jose funeral home books, aerial photos of Santa Clara, high school yearbooks, and township atlases.  It is an excellent resource, and the library and SCCHGS both have online indices and databases.  While I was at the library I applied for a library card, and now I can use the database of the historical San Jose Mercury News from the comfort of my home.

Friday night, of course, was the first episode of the second season of Who Do You Think You Are? -- which I missed.  I had an appointment that had been shuffled around during the week, and finally ended up at 8:00 p.m. on Friday.  The good news is that I'll be able to catch up (I was hoping tonight, but no luck so far) online, because NBC has been posting all the episodes.  I hope everyone else enjoyed it!

Saturday is the second day of the SCCHGS/CSGA weekend, which will be at the Santa Clara Family History Center.  We'll have presentations on land records, courthouse records, oral history interviews, and using spreadsheets in genealogy.  And Sunday I'll be in Vallejo, leading a genealogy group there.

Wouldn't it be great to have this much genealogy all the time?

2 comments:

  1. I will see you Saturday. I plan on being there all day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great! I was looking for you Friday and didn't see you.

    ReplyDelete

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