Sunday, February 4, 2007

The Super Bowl or Genealogy?

What did you do today - watch the Super Bowl, do genealogy, or something else? We have friends that intentionally go to the opera on Super Bowl Sunday and enjoy themselves. I noticed that many people sent me emails and sent messages to the Rootsweb mailing lists during the game.

Me - I did both! After getting home from church and eating lunch, I searched for about two hours to try to find living relatives of a famous Chula Vista guy - Greg Rogers (1876-1955) for a local email correspondent who needs biographical information about him. She wants to contact some of his descendants to get family information to help her in her grant-writing.

I found Greg Rogers and his family in the 1910, 1920 and 1930 census records easily in Coronado and then Chula Vista, and wrote down the names of his five children. Then it was off to the California Death Index to see if I could match the names with birth and death dates. I found three of the kids records in the 1940-1997 index online (including their mother's maiden name - Morgan), plus Greg Rogers data (including his mother's maiden name - West). Then I went back to the California Birth Index 1905-1995 and found info for the last two children whose birth dates matched those in the Death Index. One of the death index entries was for Barbara (Rogers) Cooley, the last child, so I found the names of two of her sons in the Birth Index.

Finally, I searched on Zabasearch, US-Search, People-Finder and other sites for the two Cooley boys who might still be living. All of those sites took me to the pay-up screen which I declined. Finally, I went back into ancestry.com and used their US Public Records Index and found addresses and phone numbers for both sons, and one was in Chula Vista.

Tomorrow I will go to the Chula Vista library and search for obituaries for Greg Rogers, and hopefully find the married names of his other two daughters and the names of the spouses of his sons, and perhaps even the names of his grandchildren, and where they resided at the time of his death.

I sent all of the above information about Greg Rogers to my correspondent via email and hope to hear back from her soon.

After two hours of searching, I went and had a nap before the game, then watched the game. We barbecued chicken at halftime and ate in front of the TV. It came out like I expected - I was going to blog before the game and guess the score, but I had no guts!

For the record, the high temperature in Chula Vista today was 85 F with clear blue skies - absolutely a terrible day to stay inside and watch TV. SD is not on the Super Bowl rotation because the stadium is old and does not have enough amenities for the bigwigs that come to party. It rained cats and dogs the whoelw game in Miami. Oh well.

During the second half of the game I read the latest NGS NewsMagazine between plays and during commercials. Great issue - i'll post something about it soon.

I also wondered what on earth I could blog about tonight. The result is this entry that my kids can savor for its earth-shattering yet dull completeness, and they will know exactly what I did today if they deigned to read my saintly (?) prose. If you read this far, I'm sure you will laugh to yourself and say - what a waste of my time, but hey, you're probably hooked on reading genea-bloggers like I am.

I'd better go back in my genea-cave and see what everybody else blogged about during the game!

UPDATED 8:15 PM: Very few genea-bloggers posted anything during the game - good on you!

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