July 13th Research Group Review

There were 13 attendees at the CVGS Research Group meeting on Wednesday, 13 July at the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library.

In the first hour, Randy discussed these highlights from his month of genealogy work:

*  MyHeritage released their PedigreeMap which shows where your ancestors resided when they were born, married and died.
*  MyHeritage released their new Sun Chart, which shows names and photos of ancestors or descendants in a circular fashion.  This may be useful for DNA matching.
*  He received five New Jersey vital record certificates for his Auble relatives from a colleague who visited the Archives in Trenton.

In the second hour, we went around the table and folks shared about:

*  Arlene has been working in MyHeritage and finding records.  She also likes the "On Granny's Trail" channel on YouTube.
*  Gary has been working on his royal lines and is back into the 700s.  He found a family box in his garage that had a big 1903 Bible, but the family pages were blank.
*  Shirley wondered how to search the Gallery in her Ancestry Member Tree.  We found that Ctrl-F works but only on the current page.  She is adding media to her Ancestry and MyHeritage trees when relationships and events are proved.
*  Susi and Mary had a breakthrough at the FamilySearch Center - they found books on the shelf for several ancestral towns in North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin and went back another generation.  Susi thinks she has identified a wife's maiden name on her PA Higgins line.
*  Virginia found vital records for her siblings and grandparents in the Indiana certificate databases on Ancestry.
*  Jane has been working with Ana on their 50th high school reunion, trying to find death records and living person addresses.  
*  Helen is working on her husband's genealogy, and found NJ and NY probate records that indicated there was an unknown stepson in one family.  
*  Karen S. had a contact from a 4th cousin on Ancestry from her tree.  She has a trunk of family treasures from her deceased aunt, which includes a 1916 scrapbook, letters to grandparents from a World War II son.  She wondered how to save therm.  The group suggested scanning them to save them and pass them to family members, and to preserve them in an archival scrapbook or album.
*  John has had good luck finding useful information about families in Ancestry's "North American Family Histories" database.  He has done his mitochondrial DNA on FamilyTreeDNA, and he and his wife also tested on AncestryDNA and have lots of matches.
*  Diane had a 23andMe DNA contact with a adoptee who lives in Carlsbad that connects with her son.

The next Research Group meeting will be Wednesday, 10 August 2016, at 12 noon in the Conference Room of the Chula Vista Civic Center Branch Library.