Valentine's Week Reflections

This has been an amazing week. A week ago we were snowed in and home bound entertaining our youngest granddaughter. Then when we exchanged this granddaughter for her older sister after the great thaw began, it was on to a week full of genealogy happenings.


On Tuesday we headed off to the family history center to meet with a client who I first met with in October 2013. She originally provided some information in the form of two pedigree charts. For this work the focus was on one of the family charts. At this meeting she received a copy of the list of items found on ancestry.com for these people. There were thirty records (nine pages of notes) which included:
4 - Social Security Index
10- Census records, two each from 1940, 1930, 1920, 1910, 1900
1 - California Birth Index
1 - California Death Index
1 - California Marriage Index
2 - Oregon Death Index
1 - Oregon Obituary
1 - US Public Records Vol. I
1 - US Public Records Vol. II
1 - US Veterans Gravesites
1 - Findagrave.com
7 - Massachusetts Birth Records
1 -  Massachusetts Death Index

Now this client needs to work on entering this information into a data base before we meet again. She has so much work that she wants to do for her family lines, but organization is key to further research.

On Wednesday I taught a class at the Genealogical Forum of Oregon on using Fold3.com. They are having an open house all week long, providing free classes. With about twenty-five attendees it was a lively class. There are so many key resources to use in doing online genealogy research that one must use an organized system in the process. Today I am teaching the same class at the Portland Area PAF Users Group. Every audience is so unique that no two classes are exactly alike. The key is helping others learn how to do research and providing understanding of the process.

On Thursday I met again with the first client to share some additional information. There were five newspaper articles located at genealogybank.com. These provide more insight into the people being researched.

Then I met with client number two. At this meeting she received a copy of the list of items found on ancestry.com for these people. There were twenty-six records (eleven pages of notes) which included:
1 - Social Security Index
8 - Census records, 2-1940, 3-1930, 2-1910, 1-1900
1- Minnesota Birth Index
2 - Minnesota Death Index
2 - Missouri Marriage Record
1- Oregon Death Index
1 - Oregon Obituary
9 - Findagrave.com
1 - US Veterans Gravesites

The amazing thing about this research is that the father, the grandparents and all four great grandparents were on findagrave. Obituaries were discovered for the mother in Oregon and four others were found at http://mackleygenealogy.com. This is a website that everyone should explore for family obituaries.

While these finds were great, the greatest help was that the family can be found in the Family Tree at familysearch.org. While it may not all be correct, it does provide the opportunity to print out the family group charts and pedigree charts to work off of. This eliminated the need to enter all the found information into a database, which the client can work on later.

In between all of this genealogy fun was time spent with our granddaughters and other family members. Friday, on Valentine's Day, we enjoyed a ride to the country to view the house their family is in the process of buying. This was followed with a wonderful lunch at Olive Garden.  Upon returning home we spent some time on Skype visiting with our grandsons and their family. While doing genealogy research is fun, don't overlook spending quality and quantity time with your own families. Serendipity can be found in doing both!