Regarding my highschool friend starting genealogy...

Thanks everyone for the comments on my recent post of working with a new genealogist. I met my friend last week end at the Santa Clara Seminar. That was a very well organized seminar. The speakers were fantastic! What was fun was the references to software. Unlike many seminar I visit, every time a software program was mentioned , the speaker would say something to the affect, "oh you are all from the silicon valley, so of course you know this program."

There was a silent auction. My friend had bid on the Roots Magic Software package, but alas was out bid. Being a Roots Magic fanatic myself, I am going to suggest that he does purchase this fantastic program!

It was fun meeting up with my high school friend. When I genealogies in Northern California I seldom travel solo. So he had an opportunity to meet my son, daughter in law and four grandchildren. (lol). My son had been working on a car before he picked me up from the conference, so my friend met my son in an old colored t-shirt!!

I will keep you posted; my friends roots are from Goshen Indiana. The Santa Clara Seminar was heavily directed to individual county, state research. Great sites were introduced at the seminar to state and county data collection. Several states/counties had government officials dedicated to helping people access their records. This was great to see. Example Shelby county, Tennessee.

So I am going to learn some information on Indiana records. working state to state I am gaining a wealth of information that I hope can be of use to help others find their American roots. The first step sometimes to getting back to their homeland roots.

An example of systematically reconstructing a families migration trail across America resulted in some very surprise findings for a society member. Recently I was working with a gentleman with the surname PRICE. With that surname the gentleman had assumed English roots. Wow only four generations back and we discovered PRICE was a derivative of a very German name! From there we were able to find his ancestors nationalization and transport papers from Germany. Therefore the state to state approach has been useful for some when researching roots.

I find helping others with genealogy has widen my knowledge and skills as a genealogist. To that end I am working on a very small but hopefully useful project at the Chula Vista Library. I am hoping to help some of our 100 plus members focus and continue on their own journeys. We have an excellent but under utilized library system. In my humble opinion.

I recently presented some data on the Kansas data collection system. I am hoping to "zero" in on other states of interest. Randy Seaver recently did a members survey of our membership. Hopefully he can help me understand some of the interest of the group.

I would like to start a kind of "Birds of a Feather" study group where we can really focus on the areas of interest and make suggestions to our society book purchaser books that will truly aid people in their research.

So how do I tie up the loose ends of this seemingly rambling blog? I am going to investigate if we have Indiana roots in our membership and gather those birds of a feather and do some in depth research in that area. Gaining working knowledge of individual states has honed my research skills in a very beneficial manner.

Focusing and deeper understanding of records benefits my capacity to truly aid my fellow society member in a deeper research. What is problematic for me on that subject is the redundant over hashing of "OLD" genealogy information. I liken it to lectures on databases using Excel 1998. There is just so much more out there!

Oh and did I happen to mention ROOTSMAGIC!!!!