Monday Genea-pourri

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing started this meme and I loved the idea. Genealogists are great at documenting our ancestors’ lives but not so great documenting our own. I’ll write about what I’ve been doing the past week.

Sunday, October 29, 2017. My husband, Norman, and I drove up to Sebastopol to visit our daughter, Elizabeth, to purchase some local apples, and to eat at Lowell’s where Elizabeth works. We have an electric car (Nissan Leaf) and stopped in Vallejo to charge it up to 90%. We had thought the trip wasn’t going to happen and so had not fully charged the car overnight. On a full charge, the car can make it to Sebastopol with no problem. There are chargers at a parking lot downtown where we usually charge the car for the trip home. It takes two and a half hours and we usually eat dinner while charging the car. We learned on this trip that two more charging stations had been installed since our last trip: a level 2 charger at CVS and a high-speed charger at Lucky market. Yeah, more choices! With the high speed charger, we can make short trip further toward the coast or go wine-tasting.

        Had a nice visit with our daughter. We bought local apples and a pumpkin. Later we had dinner at Lowell’s, which was fantastic as usual. It’s always a treat to eat there as the menu changes weekly, so it’s interesting to see what the chef has created with locally raised meats and veggies.

Monday, October 30, 2017. I take a conversational German class weekly in Oakland. We have six regular students, some who have been in the class at least five years. This week, only Terry, Peter, and I were in class and we spent most of the 75 minutes speaking about our respective vacations we had recently completed. Peter had gone to Greece and London. Terry went to Michigan, especially for homecoming at Michigan State. I spoke about my trip to D.C., New York City, and Boston. It was a great class.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017. After an online meeting with the publicity team for the 2019 International German Genealogy Conference (hosted by the Sacramento German Genealogy Society), I started my volunteer shift at the History Center (Contra Costa County Historical Society’s archive). I am one of the people who answer queries and do genealogy research. I also keep track of the work that is done by volunteers. Lastly, I’m working on creating a finding aid for our collections. I’m so thankful that another volunteer, Maxine, has experience in this and is helping me.

        I left early because I wanted to go to the genealogy library owned by the Genealogy Society of Vallejo. They are only open on Tuesdays from 1 to 3:30 pm. I’m doing some client work and thought they might have records that could help me. The library is one room of the Vallejo Naval and Historical Society’s building. This society also had lots of interesting materials that I was allowed to see. I may need to go back to read some newspapers. There was an index for the Weekly Vallejo Chronicle and Weekly Vallejo Recorder 1867--1879 but I need to look at papers in the 1880s.

Wednesday, November 1, 2017.  I am participating in the study group “Mastering Genealogical Proof” with DearMyrtle on a Google Hangout. This is weekly until the middle of December. I enjoy writing citations, so this has been fun so far. We read each chapter and then discuss some examples of citations from our own genealogy research.

Thursday, November 2, 2017.  Spent some time learning about Trello, a web-based project management program that we will use with the IGGC committee. After my guitar lesson, where I played some Christmas music, Norman and I met my sister, Sabrina and her husband, Steve, for dinner at La Sen, a French restaurant in Concord. It was great hearing all about their trip to London and Paris this fall and our food was all so delicious.

Friday, November 3, 2017. Just worked all day writing and researching on my KDP.

Saturday, November 4, 2017. Carpooled to the San Mateo County Genealogical Society’s fall seminar, where Rick and Pam Sayre spoke. It was a great presentation about maps, National Archives records, Library of Congress website, and Bureau of Land Management land records.

Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.