Saturday, September 23, 2006

Two Fun Genealogy Days

Friday started off poorly for me - my monitor was on the fritz, but by using the sure-fire method of unplugging and plugging it in again, it came back to life. Then my cable connection was down most of the AM. But that permitted me to get some actual genealogy work done!

I spent the morning finishing my presentation on "Pursuing Your Elusive Female Ancestors," which I'm scheduled to give 30 September at CVGS. I'm using the Open Office Presentation program (a PowerPoint knockoff), and had to bring a number of scanned images (deeds, probates, VRs, census, etc) into the presentation to use as examples. That's pretty much finished now, and is ready to print the notes and overheads (I would use an LCD projector, but I don't have a laptop or projector yet).

On Friday afternoon, I blogged a bit and then went to work on the ancestry of our friend Cora who lives in Westford MA. She knew one set of grandparents names (Richard Picking and Olive Smith) and her mother's name (Ruth Basnett) but not Ruth's parents. I found them in the census records in Lowell MA and Westford MA from 1900 to 1920 with little difficulty in HQO.

Today, I went to the FHC and found the Smith's in the 1860 to 1880 and 1930 US census, and also the Picking and Basnett families in the UK 1881 census - all in Ancestry.com.

When I came home, I found some of the BMDs in the Mass VRs 1841 to 1910 on the NEHGS site, which gave me a few maiden names for some of the wives and the parents names in two cases. The Smith line leads into New Brunswick, but Ancestry Library Edition doesn't provide early Canada census records, so I'm stuck there.

I also captured some screen images of the new Ancestry search engine for a future presentation on census records.

Before we go to the Padres' game tonight, I'm going to input all of Cora's family data into FTM and see what I'm missing. She will be surprised by all of this.

Not a bad two days of doing fun things!

How about you - are you doing fun genealogy things? Tell me about them.

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