WANDERINGS FROM YOUR PRESIDENT BY GAYLE STUART
GENEALOGISTS’ HUNTING SEASON NEVER ENDS!
As we start this New Year of 2009, we are looking back on 1909 to see what some of the events were that started off the New Year. We have gone to the Walnut Bureau for that year and have picked up on a few of them. Many of the lodges that were in Walnut back then were electing new officers, there were marriages and deaths, as resolutions were made, and talk about courage in the new year. Mention was made about some interesting sounding organizations.
It is always surprising what we come across when we look back at the old newspapers that we have on microfilm. I hope you enjoy what we have picked out for you to read.
I am going to give some more advice on doing your genealogy. Some of this is going to sound simple and doesn’t everybody know that is how you do these things? Maybe it is time to go back to the beginning of your research and take a new look at your materials.
Have you missed something? Have you documented all of your information? How about organization?
Organize: develop an efficient and systematic way to store your research, be able to access any given piece of it quickly and be able to pull material together to compare and study. So many of us have piles in different places that we are meaning to get filed in some kind of system. Make this one of your resolutions for this year to do something about it.
One thing that is recommended is to work on only one or two lines of our families. I know this is hard when you are trying to do both mother and father on both sides of your family. This is when sisters that married brothers helps cut down on the number of branches in the families. Try to focus on what you want to accomplish.
Do Not Hurry Yourself. Don’t try to skip back in time without doing your research step by step starting with yourself. Sometimes finding an obituary is the starting point and not the birth record. If it is a good obituary, there could be names and places that you can work to your advantage. If we jump to conclusions, it sometimes can lead to mistakes. Every line of our ancestors can run into snags when we get back in time. Records may be harder to find, names can be spelled differently than we thought, birth dates don’t match, a maiden name may be hard to find, and people may have used a middle name because they were named after an aunt or uncle. All of these things can slow us down and make us work harder at getting to the right facts.
Besides, genealogists never finish. We quit or die, but we don’t finish. It is hard for me to think that we would find everything that there is to know so we could say there is no more. All of us have heard people say that they have found everything, but have they?
I hope you have a successful year with your family hunting!
gbs