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The Chula Vista Genealogical Society (CVGS) Research Group meeting today had only eight attendees, but it was a loquacious bunch. Fun, too, with lots of good research experiences this past month. We went around the table, and had these discussions:
* John F. has found that his daughter-in-law's ancestry in England has at least one first cousin marriage. He also received a ship's drawing and a booklet with information about his Hull and Gaylord families from the Mary and John 1630 Clearinghouse.
* Dick M.'s nephew in North Carolina had a box in his basement from his father's (Dick's brother) house. The box has many items from Dick's grandfather's life, including a baptism certificate from 1869, and information about the grandfather's second wife, who didn't die until 1989. Her obituary revealed her maiden name, that she had eight siblings, and worked with the IRS in Minneapolis. There was also a picture of Dick's grandfather with his Model T in about 1920. Dick has started to share his data on his uncle's life of crime with this nephew.
* Virginia T. phoned the Boone County, Indiana County Clerk's office for her marriage certificate, and got a lot more. In addition to the requested certificate, they sent her the marriage license application which had much more information, including parents names and the answers to questions about health, previous marriages, etc. She got to talk to a real person, who had the marriage certificate in her hands in two days.
* Shirley B. has been emailing with the granddaughter of her nice, who saw her genealogy data online. The results of a Y-DNA test on her cousin in Texas indicated that he doesn't match anyone else in the Wright Surname Project. The results of the test for another Wright cousin have not been returned yet.
* Pam B. hit the jackpot this month, finding the complete 52-page Revolutionary War Pension File of Isaac Johnson (of Connecticut) online at www.Footnote.com. She has been transcribing the pages (using side-by-side windows of the image and her word processor) and marveling at the detailed information. Then her monitor died.
* Gary B. is still working on his Roff line. He thinks that they were in Chautauqua County, New York in around 1805. He has been checking cemetery records online. We suggested that he check land, probate and tax records to establish residence, Quaker records for vital events, and the New York state census records too.
* Randy S. showed the nifty Y-DNA Haplogroup Migration Map he received from Genebase, and passed his 20-marker Y-DNA certificate around. He also related that there were no exact matches on Genebase, Ancestry, FamilyTreeDNA or Ysearch for his results. That's probably good, because there were no Seaver folks either!
* Pam wondered what records are available for the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. We mentioned that www.militaryindexes.com has excellent online listings, and that the National Archives site (www.archives.gov/genealogy/) describes their holdings. She also wondered about day-to-day events from the past. We suggested the free New York Times archives (www.nytimes.com) for 1851-1922.
The two hours went very fast, and it was great to see the steady progress being made by each participant.
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