Friday, October 30, 2009

San Francisco Afternoon Delights

No, silly, not that! I know what you're thinking. It sounds like fun, but I'm not sure my heart would take too much of it, and my wife might look askance at me. I'm a hard working genealogy researcher. I'm talking about genealogy treats - all found this afternoon to my delight!

One of my long-term genealogy projects is to find more family history information about my wife's ancestors. She has surnames Schaffner, McKnew, Paul, and Whittle in San Francisco.

I checked many of the databases on the San Francisco Genealogy website (www.SFGenealogy.com) for records of the families. I found several nuggets of information, including this from the 1867 Great Register of Voters:

* Joseph Whittle's record, including information about his naturalization in 1861.
* Frederick Schaffner's record, including information about his naturalization in 1856.

I found a funeral notice for Dora Schaffner in 1904 in the San Francisco Funeral Home Records 1835-1931 on the FamilySearch Record Search site (http://pilot.familysearch.org). That gave me her birth and death dates, and her last address.

I checked on the San Francisco Chronicle 1865-1903 newspaper collection on www.Footnote.com. I was rewarded with death notices or obituaries for:

* John Charles Paul, died on 31 May 1879
* Robert Henry Paul, died on 14 September 1902
* John Charles Paul, died 22 September 1889
* Abbie C. Paul, died 11 November 1894

* Frederick Schaffner, died 29 February 1899
* Herman Schaffner, died 8 December 1921
* Frederick Schaffner, died 5 April 1907.
* Dora Schaffner, died 11 April 1904.

I still have the City Directories to look thorugh on www.Footnote.com and on the www.SFGenealogy.com site - a task for another day!

It was a fun and "profitable" afternoon, and I treated myself to my M&Ms because I found so much!

2 comments:

Mel said...

I am glad someone else has notice how great the SFGenealogy.com website is. I think it's one of the best sites out there. I've found so many little nuggets on my Jones-Jackson-Kelly-Dolan's on the site. It's well worth a visit if you have roots in San Francisco

Cindy Bergeron Scherwinski said...

Great post Randy ... you 'got' me with the headline

Always inspiring and interesting to read about other family historians. While I don't have any of my people in the SF area, it's good to know about the SFGenealogy.com site in the event I need it helping someone else find their roots. Blesings to you this day ... Cindy