Saturday, October 4, 2008

Research Trip to SDGS Library

There were only three hardy Chula Vista Genealogical Society members on the research trip to the San Diego Genealogical Society Library in El Cajon. You can see the holdings of the SDGS Library in El Cajon on their SDGS Research Library web page.

I think many of our members were tired out from BonitaFest last week or were at the Miramar Blue Angels airshow or the La Mesa Oktoberfest today. We did have an honorary CVGS member with us - he tried to sneak into the library before they opened.


Once inside, the intrepid Gnome tried to hide between your shy geneablogger, but failed. This is a view of the library looking back into the stacks.


The Gnome just had to try out the SDGS computer system - it works fine! Except he couldn't see the USB ports on the front of the computers (I think his back was turned!).


On the first Saturday of each month, the SDGS Family Tree Maker User's Group meets and shares information about their genealogy experiences over the last month. Jim Reynolds is the leader of this group, and is the person in the bottom left corner in the picture below.


There were 13 of us in attendance at the FTM Users group meeting. Jim passed out some handouts based on questions he'd received over the past month (this is a great idea!) - he found answers on the FTM help and FAQ pages, of course. There was some discussion of FTM 2008 (nobody is using it as their primary program yet, although several have it) and the FTM 2009 upgrade (Jim is testing this). I shared about my Using FTM 2008 series, Russ Worthington's FTM User blog, and the Genforum FTM message board, in addition to my own research. It was fun to hear what other researchers are doing, and to be able to share my information with them. I passed around the Genea-Musings URL and Russ's blog URL to the group.

After lunch, I was able to do a little of my own research - I found some useful Rhode Island Genealogical Register articles on several of my families in Volume 20, reviewed about 20 years of the Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey, and found a summary of the Martin family of Sussex County, NJ (Martin is my matrilineal brickwall surname in Sussex County).

I want to thank Marna, Shirley and Jackie for shepherding our little flock into the library and helping my colleagues with their research. We had a great time talking to the staff and digging up some useful information on the shelves of the library.

UPDATED: In Comments, Chris C. noted that the SDGS computers do have USB ports below the Dell logo - I must have missed them when I looked. He's the computer expert - my apologies for missing them. I edited the post.

2 comments:

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

The gnome certainly makes his way around.

As I live in neighboring Warren County, I would have happy to help with your Sussex County brick wall. Its "just up the street".

Thank you.

Russ

Chris said...

Randy,

The computers at the SDGS library have two usb ports on the front. They are located behind the Dell logo on the left side of the front panel.

Chris Christensen