SDGS Library visit today

Almost every Saturday is a Genealogy day for me. Two local societies (SDGS and CGSSD) have programs on the 2nd and 3rd Saturdays of each month, and another (CVGS) has a Saturday program once a quarter. When there is not a society event, I usually go to the Family History Center in San Diego to do research.

The Chula Vista Genealogical Society has research trips every two months or so to a local library - Carlsbad, San Diego, the FHC or the SDGS library in El Cajon.

Today we had a research trip to the San Diego Genealogical Society library in El Cajon. Their holdings include a good surname and locality book collection, an excellent periodical collection, and vertical files of donated material. Also, today was the monthly FamilyTreeMaker study group meeting there. We had 8 in our car pool from Chula Vista, and got there before 10 AM. The library staff greeted us warmly, and had coffee and donuts set up for us - a wonderful surprise and treat! They also gave us a brief tour of the library, and were very helpful to our group.

I attended the FTM group and learned a few things and got a question answered. Then it was off to the stacks and after browsing maybe 2 minutes, I found a book that I had been wanting to review - "Rhode Island Land Evidences, 1646-1699". I knew that there were several wills and many deed records in these records for my 40 RI surnames, but I thought I would have to decipher the originals from microfilm at some time. The book has transcriptions of the records - hooray! I copied 45 pages...now I have to get them into the database.

So, it was a good genealogy day with some new friends made at the library, and some new genealogy data to feed the database and flesh out my ancestral notes.

Friends, our genealogy libraries need our support. Too many of us research in our pajamas (i.e., use the Internet) at the expense of going to a library and finding books or microfilm to do our research. Both are important...and finding original works in repositories or libraries, in either book or microfilm form, is critical to proving ancestral relationships. The Internet does not have everything we need to do good research - at least not yet!

Thanks to the SDGS staff for their hospitality on an enjoyable and interesting genealogy day!