Life History Charts

We live in a visual society - many people learn well from pictures and graphics. I've been searching for a way to plot life events for some time, to the point of experimenting in Microsoft Excel with events and timelines, but the result has never been close to what I wanted.

I saw a reference to a free timeline chart at www.EveryDayBiographies.com today, and thought I would try it. The Zip download was easy, and the program opened easily and saved on my computer.

The web page notes:

Where they lived, the jobs they had, the celebrations, the weddings, the sad events - seeing them all on paper gives us a fascinating overview of their lives. It’s one that your entire family would love to share.

Feedback from people who have developed a loved one’s life chart:

“Seeing it all down on paper made me realise what an amazing and eventful life he had.”

“I got my sister and brother involved and they remembered things that I had totally forgotten about.”

“Since we did the chart, my daughter now feels she has a much better feel for what her dad was doing at her age and during the next ten years.”

If you look at the examples on the web page and in the download, you get the idea of how it works - you specify an event, define the years they occurred, add some text and hit Enter. Do it for the important life events and you have a graphical picture of your life. You can add color and other details as you wish. You can print the life events chart out and save it as an Excel chart if you choose.

This looks like a tool that is easy to use and may be very helpful in preparing my next family newsletter or a wall display at the next Family History Day.

The www.EveryDayBiographies.com web site has many more functions - you can submit your life memories and information and they will write a book for you - for a cost, of course.

"Climbing your Family Tree" article

An excellent article titled "Climbing Around in Your Family Tree" was published yesterday in The Tennessean newspaper, link is here, printed for Family History Month.

The article lists 11 steps to take, and provides excellent examples for each step. One comment struck me as really right:

"You become a detective. Every time you find something, it's just food for going further. It's an endless paper trail," said Virginia Watson, president of the Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society.

"It's just addictive."

Sounds like she's a geneaholic, like most of us!

Here is a sidebar box with publicity for the MTGS activities:

The Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society, which formed 20 years ago, offers publications, meetings and workshops for those interested in researching family history. For its Bible Records Project, MTGS invites the public to bring in family Bibles or copies of family Bibles to be scanned in and digitized. Bring them to the Knowles Senior Center from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Nov. 13, at 174 Rains Ave. in Nashville. The Bibles will be copied and returned immediately. The organization is hoping to publish a collection of the Bibles.

Its annual daylong seminar, which is co-sponsored by the Tennessee Historical Society, is Nov. 18 at the Brentwood Library, 8109 Concord Road. This year it will focus on finding immigrant ancestors. The guest lecturer is John P. Colletta, who has given workshops and taught courses for the National Archives and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Admission, which includes lunch, is $35 for MTGS members and $40 for nonmembers. Subtract $5 if you don't want lunch. For more information, visit www.mtgs.org.

Each local or regional society needs publicity like this to stimulate interest in family history in our communities. This is a great job done by the Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society.

Spooky names in the census

An Ancestry press release listed a number of names taken from the census records with Hallowe'en connections. The press release is here.

The release also lists a number of occupations found in the census records with Hallowe'en potential - witches, wizards and the like.

It's a fun read. The Ancestry CEO said:

"Family history creates deep emotional connections with your roots, but it can also be playful and fun, providing interesting trivia from the past," said Tim Sullivan, CEO, MyFamily.com, Inc., parent company of Ancestry.com. "These intriguing Halloween anecdotes found in our census data are great examples of the out-of-the-ordinary information you can learn from historical records, giving you a unique insight into the lives of your ancestors."

Great marketing, eh?

What's Black and White and Read all over CV?

I mentioned last week that I was interviewed by the local weekly newspaper, the Chula Vista (CA) Star-News. This paper is free to the community, and it covers the local Chula Vista news fairly well, especially sports and politics, plus it has decent advertising supplements.

When the Chula Vista Genealogical Society (CVGS) was planning the "Discover Your Family History" workshop (held on Saturday, 14 October), I sent the press release to the Star-News editor, hoping for publicity about the workshop. I got a response a week later from a reporter, and he said they would publish the workshop notice, but not do an article about it. The reporter did ask some questions about my own research and said he would like to do an article about me, so I submitted some typical questions and my answers. He followed up with several more questions, which I answered immediately.

The article appeared in last weeks Star-News dated 20 October, on page 2 continuing to page 12, including the picture of me and my ancestral chart that I posted here last week.

I will transcribe it and post the article tomorrow (the Star-News does not have a web site). It looks like they used about 20% of the material I provided, but they got the facts right and mentioned CVGS several times, so I'm happy to get CVGS and myself a little exposure.

Free Databases at Family Tree Legends

I may be days late with this, but I've heard that the databases at the Family Tree Legends web site at http://www.familytreelegends.com/records are available for free until 31 October.

There are about 400 million records in these databases. The vital records databases include:

* California Birth and Death Indexes,
* Texas birth, marriage, death and divorce indexes,
* Illinois death and marriage indexes,
* Kentucky marriage, death and divorce indexes
* Maine death index
* Missouri birth and death indexes

and several more vital records indexes.

There are also military, land, court, and probate records available, plus biographical, history, geography and reference books.

Try it out - it's free here.

Blogging will be light this weekend

We are off to Victorville to celebrate my daughter's birthday and to enjoy the company of my 20 month old granddaughter.

I think I get to babysit this afternoon - oh boy! She babbles at me, obviously some heavy philosophical discourse about her teeth hurting or about the basset hounds...so I tell her about her ancestry - reciting her mother's side of the pedigree chart. She looks at me with wonder and, um, maybe not?

Anyway, I'll be back on Monday with more Genea-Musings - deep thoughts and shallow humor on genealogy and family history. I'm still having FUN...

Genea-Man in Action!

I posted the other day about Genea-Man - my super-hero creation for a presentation I did back in January at CVGS.

Well, Janice Brown of the Cow Hampshire blog has gotten real creative and has posted a 3-panel cartoon of Genea-Man at http://www.searchroots.com/genea-man.pdf.

It may not be there for long - I will post an URL when I can find a home for it on my web site.

Thank you to Janice for her hard work - she has a very creative touch and a wonderful sense of humor (well, how else do you explain Cow Hampshire?).

My wife looked at the comic strip and laughed out loud, and wondered where all the muscles, and hair, were in my real identity. I told her that I only look like that at the library doing research, obviously!

6 Months of Blogging

The 6-month anniversary of this blog slipped past on the 15th without a notice by me - I must have been too busy rooting on the Chargers and recuperating from the CVGS "Discover Your Family History Day."

In 6 months, I have written something like 300 posts. Some were creative, some were truly important, some were very informative, some were touching, and some were pretty bad.

In the early days, it was called Randy's Musings (hence the URL name!). I posted about the Padres status, my favorite music, pictures of the family, and genealogy research.

In late June, I decided to concentrate on genealogy in this blog, and I renamed the blog Genea-Musings (it was a wandering thought captured while in the shower) - sort of a cross between heavy genealogy thoughts and light genealogy humor. I wrote about the other "stuff" on another blog, called Randy's Busy Life, but I rarely have time to post to it.

I recognized early on that I could not do complete genealogy news coverage (like Dick Eastman and Leland Meitzler), original humor (like Chris Dunham), or a pure research blog (like Steve Danko). The blog has ended up being a pot-pourri, without a strong focus on one subject.

I have always considered my audience to be, first and foremost, the members of the Chula Vista Genealogical Society, and researchers in the general genealogical community. Hence, I have tried to blog about:

1) Genealogy research tips - how-to articles, good web sites, free databases, and the like.

2) CVGS events - meetings, speakers, workshops, etc.

3) My own family research - ancestral biographies, research experiences, brick walls, etc.

4) Humor - funny or strange names, web sites, poems or prose, etc.

5) Book reviews - genealogy books, biographies or historical fiction.

6) Newspaper articles - selected solely based on personal interest!

If you have read the blog archives, you can see how the blog content has changed over time - I did have some previously written content which was quickly used up and is hiding now in the archives.

I devote at least one hour a day to finding content or creating it to feed the blog monster, unless I'm outtatown visiting the grandchildren or having fun with my wife, or both!

There is a list of about 20 genealogy blogs that I visit every night, and a longer list that I visit occasionally. I enjoy each one I read, admire most of the posts, and celebrate their successes. I like to comment when I have the time and something useful or funny to say.

My statistics show that an average of 60 visitors drop by each day, with about 25 being return visits. I do wish that there were more comments - we genealogists seem to read and move on, rather than linger and comment. Perhaps that is due to the content. However, Dick Eastman, with many more readers than I, has few comments also.

Thank you all for reading this long, and I hope you will continue to read Genea-Musings regularly.

Good luck to Jacob and Emily

There is a fascinating article at Yahoo news titled "The Multimillion Dollar Inheritance, Left in 1917 By Californian Gold Miner to His Future Smartest Great-Great-Grandchild, Still Waits for the Winner." The information apparently comes from www.SixGenerations.com.

The situation:

Henry Smith, who made his fortune by discovering gold in California during the Gold Rush and his future investments, signed his will in 1917 at the age of 86. With an unusual precision, he left his 35-year-old son George without the money. Smith was angry that his son was not married, did not have siblings, and was planning to join the United States Army in the battlefield in Europe during WWI, where he could be possibly killed.

Instead, he signed his inheritance to some unknown great-great-grandchild, to be born in the future, and he died shortly afterward. That made his son change his mind, marry soon, have a son named James, and manage the destiny of his other siblings, so they would keep the family dynasty alive for another three generations in order to get the inheritance.

The family line almost stopped when James's only son David was killed in Vietnam in 1964. His father was forced to remarry, and at the age of 47 he and his new wife Mary had another son, Michael. Michael, now 40, and his wife Jennifer, have two children, Emily, 17, and Jacob, 16, who are the straight heirs of their great-great-grandfather Henry.

The judicial problem with selecting the right heir for billion-dollar assets is that even though the children have agreed to share the money equally, they still must compete with each other, because legally the inheritance should be given to only one: the smartest child.

Read the whole article.

Emily and Jacob must square off to find the "smartest heir" - presumably by winning the chess-style card game called "The Heirs" created by Six Generations, Inc., and described at http://www.sixgenerations.com/. I sure hope their parents taught them to share.

My cursory reading of the SixGen web site is that this game sounds like a lot of fun, and perhaps could be used by families, or even genealogy societies, to teach genealogy principles and family relationships.

Do you know what Aliquot Parts are?

When I corresponded with Linda Schreiber, who provided the informative and useful research tip about finding neighbors in the BLM General Land Records, I asked her about the term 'Aliquot.' Linda provided the information below, from which source I don't know.

However, it is not in Eastman's Dictionary of Genealogy or in the index of Wade Hone's book "Land and Property Research." I thought the definition was useful to have for those of us trying to understand the GLO records:

Aliquot Parts

Using the rectangular system of survey, lands were divided into Townships containing 6 square miles. Each Township was subdivided into 36 Sections, each containing approximately 640 acres. Each Section was further subdivided into halves and quarters, repeatedly, until the parcel of land was accurately described. Without the use of Fractional Sections, Blocks, or Lots (in the case of uneven parcels of land), Aliquot Parts were used to represent the exact subdivision of the section of land. Halves of a Section (or subdivision thereof) are represented as N, S, E, and W (such as "the north half of section 5").

Quarters of a Section (or subdivision thereof) are represented as NW, SW, NE, and SE (such as "the northwest quarter of section 5"). Sometimes, several Aliquot Parts are required to accurately describe a parcel of land. For example, "ESW" denotes the east half of the southwest quarter containing 80 acres and "SWNENE" denotes the southwest quarter of the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter containing 10 acres. It is important to remember that the Aliquots shown in the data base (e.g., "SWNENE") usually translates into words found on the land document.

In General:

- a section contains 640 acres,
- a half section contains 320 acres,
- a quarter section contains 160 acres,
- a half of a quarter contains 80 acres,
- a quarter of a quarter contains 40 acres, etc.

My thanks again to Linda for her help in understanding and using the GLO records at http://glorecords.blm.gov.