Wordless Wednesday Great Northern Goat #7

This is two more pages from the Great Northern Goat I started six weeks ago, here is week one ,week two, week three, week four, week five and week six

Saturday Night Fun Census Indexing

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and I really think that you should do this), is to:


1) If you are not one already, become a FamilySearch Indexing volunteer so that you can work on the 1940 U.S. Census when it comes out after 2 April 2012. Go to https://www.familysearch.org/volunteer/indexing and sign up to index. If this is new for you, take the Test Drive, download the software, and do some tonight!


2) Once you have the software on your computer, then do some indexing. If you are new to indexing, then download a batch and work on it, learning the process along the way.


3) If you are an experienced indexer, then do a batch or two for SNGF.


4) Tell us what record collection you indexed, and how many records you did tonight.

As much as I would like to help with the indexing of the 1940 census, I don't think I will be able to. As an accountant I know I will not have a free moment to do indexing till after April 17th of 2012, and by then I expect the 1940 census to be indexed. Does this mean I will not do any indexing? No I started indexing for the Washington State Digital Archives in 2004 and continue to today. Right now I am proofreading the 1890 Special Census for Surviving Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and widows, etc. for Spokane Falls in Spokane County state of Washington, hope to finish a couple of pages tonight.

The Washington State Digital Archives has 108,625,639 records preserved, 34,848,770 searchable records and new this month 3,142,343. It was the model that Family Search copied to put all the records Family Search has online today, and they also copied the use of volunteers to digitize the records to make them searchable.

Wordless Wednesday Great Northern Goat Centerfold

This is the centerfold from the Great Northern Goat I started five weeks ago, here is week one ,week two, week three, week four and week five

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy Genealogy Libraries

Week #8 – Genealogy Libraries

Week 8 – Genealogy Libraries: Genealogy libraries (and dedicated departments in regular libraries) are true treasures in the family history community. Tell us about your favorite genealogy library. What or who makes it special?

In 1993 I started volunteering on the second Thursday in the genealogy section of the Spokane Public Library, and so I think it is the most special genealogical library in all of Eastern Washington. Since Eastern Washington Genealogical Society started in 1935 EWGS has had a long time to collect books, microfilm, microfiche and maps. Many of the early members traced their ancestors back to New England, so we have almost a complete set of the early New England record books, we have the a large collection of periodicals and thanks to PERSI they are easy to search. We have the Washington Death Index on microfilm and microfiche from 1907 to I think it is 2004. We have city directories from 1883 to the present, and probably the oddest collection of postal forwarding address books from about 1906 to 1939, but most of the 1930s they did not use them much so not a lot of forwarding addresses in those. These books are in real bad shape so I hope we can preserve them as the information in them can never be found anywhere else.
The other thing that makes it special is our wonderful relationship with the Spokane Public Library, even before EWGS was formed, the library was collecting books on the northwest, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington and when the new library building was opened in 1994 the Northwest Room has its own climate control to preserve the books some over 100 years old. The library also has the Spokane newspapers from 1880 to the present and the WPA did a subject index of the newspaper from 1880 to 1920.

Saturday Night Fun Roulette Number

It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) What year was your paternal grandfather born? Divide this number by 100 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your "roulette number."

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an "ahnentafel"). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the "roulette number."

Grandpa Hansen was born 1870/100=18.7 or 19

#19 is Johanne Margrethe Jensdatter She was born about 1803 in Tullebolle on the island of Laangeland in Denmark. She married Jorgen Pedersen and they had 6 children, 4 sons and 2 daughters. Karen Jorgensen b. 8 June 1840 was my great grandmother.

Wordless Wednesday Great Northern Goat #5

Two more pages from the Great Northern Goat I started four weeks ago, here is week one ,week two, week three and week four

Happy Valentines Day

Another Postcard from my dad's postcards, this one in 1915 from his 4 year old cousin Walter. My dad would have been 8 years old in February 1915.

Saturday Night Fun Two degrees of Separation

It's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!!

The genealogy world was reminded (again) of how time flies, relatively speaking, by the news that there are two living grandchildren of President John Tyler (1790-1862). This past week there was the Robert Krulwich blog post about persons knowing people who knew famous people long ago.

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I want you to:

1) Using your ancestral lines, how far back in time can you go with two degrees of separation? That means "you knew an ancestor, who knew another ancestor." When was that second ancestor born?



Well this picture is my 4 grandparents, my uncle Leigh and my parents:
Anton Hansen b. 10 July 1870 in Denmark, his parents
Hans Mikkelsen b 21 April 1837 and Karen Jorgensen b. 8 June 1840
Anna (Dillingham) Hansen b. 11 June 1872 her parents
Stanislaus Potoski Dillingham b. 8 August 1835 Eliza Minerva (Hellenbolt) Dillingham b. 1 March 1845
Charles Rupert Kelly b. 28 August 1890 his parents
Robert Forsyth Kelly b. 23 July 1855 Vada Belle (Hert) Kelly b. 25 March 1871
Cleo (Travis) Kelly b. 8 August 1890 her parents
Orville Travis b. 18 September 1864 Donna (Vanderpool) Travis b. 26 November 1873

So the earliest two were Hans Mikkelsen b. 1837 and Stanislaus Dillingham b. 1835

Wordless Wednesday Great Northern Goat #4

Two more pages from the Great Northern Goat I started three weeks ago, here is week one and week two. and week three