CVGS Research Group Meeting Summary

We had our monthly meeting of the Chula Vista Genealogical Society Research Group today at the library, with nine in attendance, including three guests (and hopefully soon-to-be members). The highlights were:

* John received another marriage record from the English Civil Registration for his daughter-in-law's family. He is happy that the cost has come down to about $11 (7 pounds) for them due to the exchange rates. He ordered a will from the North Carolina State Archives, and found land records for one of his families online at the Archives site after working through books on the CVGS library shelves.

* Dick is frustrated that the FBI won't send him information about his Uncle Jim, the post-office robber. Jim's been dead over 50 years, but they are withholding documents to protect the privacy of third parties (who are probably deceased). He's planning a trip to Wisconsin to visit graveyards, and wondered how to find places with GPS coordinates without a GPS. We suggested maps from Google Earth to help him find the cemeteries. Or buy a GPS!

* Shirley's trip to the FHC last week was fruitful - she found some Plue (Plug/Plough/Pflug) people in the 1820 census in NY, and later found them in the 1840 to 1880 censuses also - a different spelling every year! She's been corresponding with a man who found Pflug family baptism records in a Schoharie County record book that look like her folks.

* Joyce (a visitor) is just starting her search, and wants to trace her father's life in Alabama where he died in 1944. We gave her a quick primer on doing research, and suggested that she find death, marriage, birth, cemetery, obituary, military, census, etc. records to try to define his life, and those of his wife and children, then work back to his siblings and parents. We offered family group sheets and a pedigree chart as a way to document what she finds, and offered to help her on Mondays in the Table Talk area. She's excited by the hunt, and has lots of questions.

* Flossie (a visitor) came with Joyce, and has quite a bit of ancestral family information already. She's been to the LDS FHC in Mesa and received help there. She wants to gather all of the family photos, scan them and distribute them to her family members.

* Gary is still working on his second great-grandfather Solomon Roff, but has had little luck finding Roffs living or buried in Cayuga County NY where Solomon was born in 1805. He has looked at records from over 200 cemeteries there.

* Dearl says that there were too many Glenns who were illiterate and moved around too much. He's stuck on his second great-grandfather William Glenn, born in 1795 in North Carolina. There are 24 Glenn families in the 1800 census, five of them with sons under age 10. Dearl has had a Y-DNA test, and has an exact match with a man in Turkey. Huh?

* Ruth (a visitor) is not new to genealogy research, but wants to get better organized. She has family tree data on Ancestry, MyHeritage and MyFamily, and wants to get it all in one place. We suggested a free software program like Family Tree Builder or Personal Ancestral File, and getting GEDCOMs of her data from the web sites, create one database with all of the information, and then replacing the databases at the online sites.

* Randy briefly mentioned buying and working in RootsMagic 4 and trying to find the parents of Devier J. Lamphere before his talk on 25 April.

This session went long because the visitors were excited about finding help and listeners. Dearl took them over to the CVGS library shelves and provided some family group sheets, pedigree charts and membership applications to them.