Saturday, April 30, 2011

Update on April Genealogy Goals

Well, I must say that I did very well on my April genealogy goals. Below are my goals and the results:

1) Finish adding marriage records from the Ohio County marriages database at FamilySearch. Currently, I have found three records for my Fink relatives. - Finished adding Fink marriages to my RootsMagic database. My great-great-great-grandfather's sister, Ella Pemberton, married Jacob Fink in 1871 and they moved from Michigan to Toledo, Ohio, sometime between 1894 and 1900. In fact, I could never find their marriage record in Michigan, except for one dated 1894, several years after all their children were born, which was strange. I just assumed they were married in Michigan since Ella's family lived there and all their children were born there between 1872 and 1890. In Jacob's affidavit for my great-great-great-grandfather's pension, he stated he had known him since his wedding to his sister in the summer of 1871. Sure enough, with the Ohio County Marriages database, I was able to find their marriage record in Toledo in 1871. They must have married in Toledo in 1871, had all their children in Michigan from 1872 to 1890, recorded their marriage a second time in Michigan in 1894 (not sure why), and then moved to Toledo between 1894 and 1900.

2) Enter and scan at least five records from my "To Be Entered" folder. Many of these are death records found at Seeking Michigan and some obituaries I found at the St. Clair County Library in Michigan last time I was there in June 2009 (yes, nearly two years ago...yikes!). A few of the other items are wedding invitations and such I've received from family members in the last two years or so. - I believe I may have entered about 10-15 items from my "to be entered" folder. I entered some San Diego City Directory info from the 1930s and 1940s for my bro-in-law's family, my cousin's wedding invitation from June 2009, my maternal grandfather's social security application, my cousin's birth announcement from a 2009 Michigan newspaper, my bro-in-law's maternal grandfather's death certificate, my paternal grandfather's death certificate and obituary, and my maternal grandfather's death certificate and obituary. Phew! Notice I didn't even get to the obituaries and death certificates mentioned in my original goal. Maybe in May.

3) Finish cleaning up the source citations and events in RootsMagic on the following families:
a) Lewis B. HERIN and Sarah A. RIPLEY - my Aunt L's great-great-grandparents
b) Lewis B. HERIN and Piety ROBERTS (same Lewis above with his second wife)
c) Ferdinand HERIN and Samantha BLEDSOE (Lewis B. HERIN's parents)
- I did manage to clean up all the sources and events for the above families, as well as enter some additional sources for siblings of my aunt's grandparents and great-grandparents. Texas is a rather easy place to find info online. I also added a marriage record search to my to-do list for my aunt's grandparents and great-grandparents and their siblings in Delta and Lamar Counties in Texas.

4) Finish entering in tombstone info found at FindAGrave for Lewis B. HERIN, Sarah A. RIPLEY, and Piety ROBERTS. - Finished this and added a few more FindAGrave entries for my aunt's HUIE relatives.

5) Start scanning and entering sources for the family of my Aunt S - the HOFFNER/URBAN family from New Jersey. - I did not start this just yet because I decided to flesh out my HERIN research, but I did review the obituaries I had in my HOFFNER and URBAN file folders. I also snagged a newspaper article I needed from the LSU library when I went to Louisiana for a few days around Easter.

Hopefully, May is just as successful as April, but I will begin studying again for the CPA exam, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Good-Bye, Uncle John!


John Michael Pemberton
April 15, 1950 - April 8, 2011

My mom called last night and told me that my uncle, her oldest brother, passed away last night in Port Huron, Michigan. He is the first of my parents' siblings on either side of my family to pass away. He had been sick for the last 10 years or so. He had diabetes and had been through a kidney transplant a few years ago that didn't work out too well. Since then, he had been on dialysis. For about the last month or so, we all knew he was going to die any time now, so my mom and her siblings in Louisiana took a trip up there to visit him and just returned about two weeks ago. Now they are headed up there again for the funeral.

Of course, leave it to my family to be concerned about where to find Zummo brand sausage on their way to a funeral. I was woken up at 9:30 this morning because they were lost in Baton Rouge and looking for a Wal-Mart. I finally got them to a Wal-Mart, but they didn't have the sausage. They have called just about every grocery store from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi/Alabama border to find this stuff. They keep calling me because none of them have iPhones to look the phone numbers up, and I guess they can't figure out how to do it on the GPS. Apparently, Zummo is a southeast Texas based company, and it's pretty hard to find their product outside southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. My uncle in Michigan loves Zummo brand sausage and wants them to bring some. Lesson learned: Don't forget your Zummo sausage before going east of Lafayette.

I wish I could go to the funeral because I really didn't get to say good-bye while he was still alive. Last time I saw him was in June 2009 when I was in Michigan for my Uncle Dennis' (mom's brother-in-law) funeral. I'm tempted to go b/c it's only a 12 hour drive from North Carolina, but I have a busy week at work next week. I have to finish financial statements before the monthly manager meeting on Friday. It would be nice to work for a company with more than one staff accountant. Sigh. And even though I say it's "only" 12 hours, that is a lot of driving for one person to do in a short time. I would only be able to stay 2 nights. Oh, well.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Genealogy Goals for April

Tonia over at Tonia's Roots and Tina over at Gen Wish List post their genealogy goals monthly. So, I decided that maybe that is a good idea. I seem to jump around a lot with my genealogy, and I hope that goals will keep me more focused and help me to see my accomplishments. I tend to focus on what I haven't done yet. For now, I will post my goals for the rest of April.

1) Finish adding marriage records from the Ohio County marriages database at FamilySearch. Currently, I have found three records for my Fink relatives.

2) Enter and scan at least five records from my "To Be Entered" folder. Many of these are death records found at Seeking Michigan and some obituaries I found at the St. Clair County Library in Michigan last time I was there in June 2009 (yes, nearly two years ago...yikes!). A few of the other items are wedding invitations and such I've received from family members in the last two years or so.

3) Finish cleaning up the source citations and events in RootsMagic on the following families:
a) Lewis B. HERIN and Sarah A. RIPLEY - my Aunt L's great-great-grandparents
b) Lewis B. HERIN and Piety ROBERTS (same Lewis above with his second wife)
c) Ferdinand HERIN and Samantha BLEDSOE (Lewis B. HERIN's parents)

4) Finish entering in tombstone info found at FindAGrave for Lewis B. HERIN, Sarah A. RIPLEY, and Piety ROBERTS.

5) Start scanning and entering sources for the family of my Aunt S - the HOFFNER/URBAN family from New Jersey.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Review of Clooz 2.0

UPDATE: Since writing this blog post, a newer version of Clooz, version 3.2, has been released that makes some significant improvements over the previous 2.0 version reviewed here. I have not had time to write a full review of the new software, though I have dabbled in it and very much like the improvements. There is a new composite view, which allows the user to see all instances of a person in each document from the People screen. There is also a new template for the 1940 census, and many small bugs have been fixed. Most impressive is the fact that a new owner, Ancestral Systems, LLC, has taken over the product and will now make regular updates to the software. I hope to do a new review soon. In the meantime, please visit the Clooz website for more details and perhaps take a test drive.

In the world of genealogy, despite the studying for the CPA exam and this being my busy season at work, I've managed to get quite a bit organized in my RootsMagic database and Clooz program. In fact, I've gotten all my census records from my RootsMagic database into Clooz. Now that I have them all entered into Clooz, I've decided that I'm not really going to use Clooz anymore. Funny, I know.

For those of you who don't know, Clooz is a software program that is supposed to be like an electronic filing cabinet. I think it was invented back in the day when genealogy management programs, like Family Tree Maker, did not really allow for much sourcing. Clooz has official forms to enter data into, such as death records, marriage records, birth records, census records, city directories, etc.

I really like the forms for the census records, but other than that, I'm not as impressed with the forms for other records. For instance, the marriage record does not have a field for witnesses or date of birth. There is a notes field in each record , but jamming everything into the notes is not really ideal.

The beauty of Clooz is that you are supposed to be able to attach a record to all the individuals named in the record, but when trying to do so, it gets kind of awkward. When I attach a person as a witness, the fields for data entry are the same fields as for the bride and groom. Seems like different roles should have different fields. This causes reports on my mom to show her occupation as "fireman" on her birth certificate, but this was actually her father's occupation.

Clooz seems to work better with a paper system of genealogy, allowing you to quickly find where a paper record is located by assigning each record an ID number. Since I am trying to go paperless with my filing system, it makes even less sense for me to continue using Clooz. My paperless filing system involves folders on each surname and within those folders, folders for each couple with that surname. This makes it pretty easy to find any document I may need without having to assign an ID number. My old system of paper filing worked better with Clooz because I filed by record type instead of surnames, which made it harder to quickly locate a document.

The one benefit to Clooz that I may be giving up is the ability to create reports on an individual that show all records/sources on that individual. I think I will miss that option a little. I say "a little" because the reports are not very flexible. I can create my own reports in Excel that I can tailor to my specific needs. In fact, I believe there are already some Excel templates that can be found through Google for the purpose of creating your own reports summarizing sources and info contained in them for an individual. I will also miss the census forms mentioned earlier, but I know there are also Excel templates out there for the same purpose.

Overall, I feel that Clooz no longer meets my needs and lacks flexibility. I would be curious if anyone else currently uses or has ever used Clooz and what your thoughts are on the matter.