CVGS Research Group Report - 10 September 2008

The September meeting of the Chula Vista Genealogical Society Research Group was today at the Library. There were 14 attendees at this meeting, and they all had something to share. We started with a brief review of some of the Genealogy News highlights as discussed here.

Then we went around the table and each person shared their research efforts over the past month or so:

* John founds some interesting books on New Hampshire genealogy at Carlsbad Library. He has been researching his daughter-in-law's English family, and ordered two birth records through the FreeBMD service.

* Angie is working on the German and English ancestry of one great-grandmother, and the Spanish ancestry of her other great-grandparents. She found a census record for her grandfather.

* Joan has been searching for more newspaper articles from the 1915-1920 period for her mother-in-law. She passed around one clipping of Ann Darling (her stage name).

* Dearl has his new computer running, and has been reorganizing his paper files.

* Dave has been working in FTM 2008. He is trying to download a GEDCOM of his database on Ancestry so that he can use it in FTM 2008 without re-entry of data.

* Terry enjoyed the Carlsbad Library trip, where he got a library card. He has been working in HeritageQuestOnline trying to find census records. He made an Inter-Library Loan request to Oklahoma to find a newspaper article about his grandfather's accidental death.

* Bobbie has been trying to find immigration dates for her father's German Titus line. She went to a recent GRA meeting and asked the speaker for some help. He provided the name of another researcher in Germany, whose wife is Bobbie's distant cousin. They are exchanging information.

* Bob T asked where he might find records from Czech Republic and Hungary before 1910. He only knows his grandfather's birth date and approximate location. The group suggested checking message boards, the FEEFHS organization, and determine if the LDS FHLC has films for his localities.

* Olive just started doing research. She knew the name of one great-grandparent before she went to a family reunion and received information from a nephew with lots of ancestral information. She wanted to know how to effectively do genealogy research.

* Virginia took a trip to Indiana to visit the Allen County Public Library genealogy holdings (it's a big place, she said!) and found three books she was looking for. She then went to the Midwestern Roots Genealogy conference for two days and brought back a syllabus and several useful genealogy items, including a genealogy clipboard and a small ring notebook that holds foldout family group sheets.

* Dick has done a bit more on his aunt's military records, and is attending Judy Helton's weekly genealogy classes at Chula Vista Adult School.

* Charlotte had a long road trip across the USA. In Kentucky, she met a second cousin with a wealth of family photographs. The cousin's scanner died, so she will send images to Charlotte later. She and her cousin found that they had received similar dolls from two generations of grandmothers.

* Bob P. had a response to a message board post from 2001, and is working with his correspondent. He signed up for the $89 Y-DNA test on Ancestry DNA.

* Randy discussed his Carlsbad Library finds, and passed several copies around. He discussed his success finding an obituary on Google News Archive Search, and passed it around.

We had only one problem solving question: Bobbie has been looking for male Titus cousins to take part in a Y-DNA study. She has 1930 census data, and identified cousins, and their male children, in California, Arizona, Michigan and New Jersey. She has made two calls to cousins, provided family information to them, but they have not yet agreed to do the test. She's going to work on living male cousins in the other states. The group suggested www.veromi.net as the best people-finder site for living people.

Look at that list of 14 people and the variety of experiences, localities and research topics we talked about this month. The time went by extremely fast!

The CVGS Research Group meets every second Wednesday at 12 noon in the Conference Room at the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library. The group shares their experiences, passes around interesting and helpful documents for show-and-tell, and tries to help attendees solve their research problems.