The Yakima Valley Genealogical Society is holding its general meeting at the library at 10:00 AM on Saturday, January 6. Judy Schuster will speak about the use of “Time Lines”. The public is welcome to attend at 1901 S. 12th Avenue, Union Gap. Call 509-248-1328 for further information.
REILEY KIDD,
VOLUNTEER OF FALL QUARTER
SGS is pleased to honor and recognize Reiley Kidd for the various roles he has served in since joining the society in 1983.
Before Reiley had the spare time to be a volunteer, he benefited from the many services SGS provides, such as library resources, seminars, classes, and knowledgeable volunteers willing to lend him a hand with his genealogical research.
After retirement in 2014, he took on his first major role at SGS as a Library Trustee. Later that same year, he stepped in to fill the position of Secretary that became vacant on the SGS Board of Directors. He served as the SGS Secretary until June 2017.
One of the projects that Reiley is most proud of is the KC3I Court index. Over 10 years of work went into completing this database, which contains over 1.7 million entries from King County probate cases, divorces, and more. If you have ever used this valuable resource, you have Reiley, members Marilynn Van Hise and Winifred Price, and their team of volunteers to thank. Over 300 research requests have been fulfilled!
Reiley has stepped back a bit from SGS, but still fills three “minor roles” (his words, not ours). He continues to fulfill research requests for patrons through KC3I. He leads the Family Tree Maker (FTM) Users Group, that meets on the second Saturday of every even-numbered month. And last, but not least, he writes proposals for an annual grant from 4Culture. SGS received $3,500 in grant money from 4Culture in 2017.
Reiley says he is proud to be a part of the continuous operation of the Seattle Genealogical Society, an important part of this city for nearly 100 years.
Thank you, Reiley, for your years of service to SGS!
ANNUAL SGS CLEAN LIBRARY WORK PARTY
DECEMBER 28, 2017
The pleasure of your company (guys and gals) is requested to assist with the cleaning of the SGS Library between 10 am and 2 pm on Thursday, December 28. Refreshments will be provided. If you are able to help, please RSVP to: operations@SGS.org
SGS ANNUAL APPEAL
Membership dues cover less than half of the costs of maintaining the unique SGS research library, educational programs, and family history services that enrich our broader community. So each year SGS appeals to you, our generous members and friends, for the tax deductible donations that are needed to sustain the society.
This year there are a few ways to donate.
Your donation could go further in December, thanks to PayPal and their PayPal Giving Fund Website.
If you donate to SGS online using the PayPal Giving Fund Website and your PayPal account, PayPal will waive the fee they usually would charge SGS for that transaction, plus they will match 1% of your donation amount! If you have a PayPal Account and want to take advantage of this offer, please enter here:
https://www.paypal.com/
(Here you will be asked to log in to your PayPal account in order to complete the payment transaction. PayPal will send you a PayPal Giving Fund tax receipt via email)
Another way to donate is using the form current SGS members received in the mail earlier in December, or using the form that was emailed to eNews subscribers on December 5th. If you prefer, that can also be done via the donate page on the SGS website. Here’s that link:
http://
(Here you will receive an email invoice from PayPal and can use your credit/debit card to complete the payment)
Thanks so much, everyone!
SGS CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Unless otherwise indicated all programs will be at the SGS Library, 6200 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle. Check the SGS Web Site for additions, changes, and corrections. Programs may be canceled or postponed because of inclement weather. The SGS Library will be closed from December 22 through January 1, 2018, for the holidays.
DECEMBER
Saturday, December 16, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Irish SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, December 16, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, German SIG, with Jean Roth
JANUARY
Saturday, January 6, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Family Tree Interest Group, Lou Daly, leader of this special interest group exploring all the features of the tool Family Tree on FamilySearch
Saturday, January 13, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, Second Saturday Speaker Series, “Chinese Exclusion Act Files – Original Documents at NARA” will be presented by Trish Nicola
Sunday, January 14, 1:30pm – 3:00pm, Scandinavian SIG, with Karen Knudson
Saturday, January 20, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Irish SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, January 20, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, German SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, January 27, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, DNA SIG, this group meets at the Wedgwood Presbyterian Church, 8008 35th Ave NE, Seattle. For more information contact SGSDNASIG@gmail.com Co-chaired by Cary Bright and Herb McDaniel.
Announcing the Mayflower 2020 Website from American Ancestors!
We are pleased to announce that we recently launched a new interactive website to commemorate the upcoming 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing. The site presents the most authoritative biographies to date of the Pilgrims who set sail for a new world 397 years ago—available for free for the first time. The biographies are drawn from Robert Charles Anderson’s Pilgrim Migration, the biographical details include information on births, marriage, children, and roles in Plymouth Colony. As we approach 2020, more in-depth features and scholarly material will be added to the site to commemorate the historic Mayflower voyage.
Learn About the Passengers
The site also invites the living descendants of Mayflower passengers to engage with the past by becoming a part of modern Mayflower history. The 2020 website is currently gathering the world’s first online gallery of Pilgrim descendants—NEHGS is documenting the ever-increasing diaspora of an estimated 30 million living descendants of the original Mayflower passengers around the world. Descendants are invited to commemorate their connection and heritage to these venerated figures of our nation’s history by placing their name, photograph, and other identifiers in an online gallery—immediately joining a virtual community of people worldwide who share Mayflower ancestry.
Join the Modern Descendants
The Eastside Genealogical Society will meet on Thursday, January 11, 2018 in the Emerald Heights Retirement Community (Emerald Room) at 10901 176th Circle NE, Redmond, WA 98052 at 7 pm, with doors opening at 6:30 pm for networking. (See our website for Driving Instructions.)
Topic: Catching Your Ancestors in the Act, Using Newspapers to Track Your Ancestors in Time and Place — The daily activities of our ancestors are often captured by the ubiquitous local newspapers, human interest, comedy, tragedy it is all there whether or not our ancestors wanted to appear in print or not. Even better the number of historic newspapers available for research just keeps growing and many are available online for free. We will discuss both free and subscription sites as well as the many state archives and demonstrating the Chronicling America website through my favorite backdoor at Stanford University. Come, learn and have fun!
Speaker: Bob Barnes is a past president of the EGS and currently chairs it education program. He teaches genealogy classes for the King County Library System and has been a genealogy instructor at the Bellevue College Telos Program for a number of years. He also provides genealogy assistance at both at the Bellevue Library and the Bellevue Family History Center.
See our website for Driving Instructions, FREE genealogical help and other Special Interest Group meetings. Visitors are always welcome at all meetings. www.eastsidegenealogicalsociety.com or https://eastsidegenealogicalsociety.com/
The German Interest Group of The Eastside Genealogical Society (EGS) will meet on Friday, January 5, 2018, from 1 to 3 pm in the Relief Society Room of the LDS Church at 10675 NE 20thSt, Bellevue, WA 98004 with doors opening at 12:45 pm for networking. Visitors are always welcome at our meetings.
Topic: Using US Records to Search for an Immigrant Ancestor’s Village – Locating an immigrant ancestor’s village can be challenging. Not all records are online or have the information being sought. Three speakers will share their experiences using US records to find an ancestor’s Old World village. They’ll discuss what they did, where they went and what they found. Strategies and tips offered here can be modified to apply to any immigrant ancestor.
Speaker: Janet O’Conor Camarata, a member of Eastside Genealogical Society and South King County Genealogical Society, has over 25 years of experience in genealogy. She is an instructor in genealogy at Pierce College, a seminar presenter and trainer in genealogy societies across Washington, who takes advantage of the latest technology and staying mobile with the latest computing tools.
Speaker: Dorothy Pretare started collecting family history in 1995 and is active in 2 local genealogical societies, leader of the EGS German Interest Group and a member of 2 societies in Minnesota. In 2008, she visited her ancestral villages in old East Germany and present day Poland.
Speaker: Melanie Matway was fortunate to have learned her immigrant ancestors’ villages first-hand with one exception. The quest for a great-grandmother’s village of origin has taken her to Ohio and Pennsylvania and has been a learning experience utilizing a variety of records and non-familial sources of information.
For more information, kindly visit our website at https://egsgermangroup.wordpress.com/ .
ABOUT OUR PROGRAM: Tired of being told by state and local archives and government agencies that your family’s genealogical records are “unavailable” to the public or only available if you visit them onsite? We were too, so we figured out what to do about it. We’re Reclaim The Records, a new activist group that filed a first-of-its-kind Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) legal petition in the Supreme Court of New York against the NYC Municipal Archives in order to access to twentieth century genealogical records…and won! We also secured the first-ever public release of the indices to hundreds of thousands of vital records from the New Jersey State Archives. And we’re filing many more requests against city and state agencies, large and small. This presentation will tell the story behind these cases, walk through the legal basics of FOIL, and teach genealogists how to file their own FOIL requests for their own records.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER: Brooke Schreier Ganz is the founder of Reclaim The Records, a not-for-profit activist group that uses state Freedom of Information requests to return genealogical records to the public. As the former Vice President of Gesher Galicia, she designed and built their website, including its innovative “All Galicia Database”. The underlying search engine codebase, named “LeafSeek,” was released by Brooke as a free open source project, for which she won second place in the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge. She further refined it to build the bilingual “All Israel Database” for the Israel Genealogical Research Association (IGRA). She lives in California
VIRGINIA PERSONAL PROPERTY TAX
If you are looking for data on an ancestor that resided in Virginia during the decades 1780-1820, here is a resource Christine Schomaker, SGS board member and desk volunteer, would like to share with you.
The Virginia Personal Property Tax, “PPT”, has been collected almost every year since 1782. In Colonial Virginia the noun “tithable” referred to a person who paid, or for whom someone else paid, one of the taxes imposed by the General Assembly. Basically it was a tax on the productive workforce; free white males over 16, all slaves – both male and female, both African American and Native American. White females were not recorded unless they where head-of-household.
In these early decades, the annual “PPT” list reads like a census with counts of “tithables” plus horses, cattle and whatever else was legally defined as taxable property at the time. Complete microfilms of the original PPT lists for nearly all counties are available at the Library of Virginia in Richmond and may be borrowed on interlibrary loan.
Read more about it at:
http://www.lva.virginia.gov/
Thanks to Steve and Bunny Binns, some of these records can be viewed online! Their free website “Virginia Tax List Censuses” offers indexed and linked images of the 1790, 1800, and a few 1810 PPT lists as substitutes for the lost US Federal Censuses of Virginia for those years. Here’s the link to their site:
http://www.binnsgenealogy.com/
You will probably want to see all the intervening tax years as well. You can track families arriving and moving away, sons turning 16 or 21, and property owners passing on, leaving widows in charge. The Binns have you covered here, too. You can purchase CD’s of the PPT list images for each county available. Or, better yet, you can subscribe to the “Tax List Club” and have online access to all of them. Although these images are not indexed, beginning in 1787, most counties recorded surnames alphabetically by first letter and you can navigate pretty quickly to the appropriate image file. Find out more here:
http://www.binnsgenealogy.com/
Stop by the SGS library some Tuesday and Christine will be happy to help you get started exploring the Virginia PPT. Ask for a short tutorial.
Even in this day and age not everything can be found online, so while you’re at our library check out the three-volume set, “The 1787 Census Of Virginia”. It was intended as a substitute for the lost 1790 US Federal Census of Virginia. Transcribed and indexed by Netti Schreiner-Yantis & Florene Speakman Love, this set also includes those counties now in Kentucky and West Virginia, which separated from Virginia in 1792 and 1863, respectively.
You can find this set on the Virginia shelf at the SGS Library, call number: VA:0-150 a,b,c.
SGS CALENDAR OF EVENTS
Unless otherwise indicated all programs will be at the SGS Library, 6200 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle. Check the SGS Web Site for additions, changes, and corrections. Programs may be canceled or postponed because of inclement weather. The SGS Library will be closed from December 22 through January 1, 2018, for the holidays. The Scandinavian Interest Group will not meet in December.
Please note the time change for the Family Tree Interest Group on Saturday, December 2; they will be meeting at 1:00 pm.
DECEMBER
Saturday, December 2, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, Family Tree Interest Group, Lou Daly, leader of this special interest group exploring all the features of the tool Family Tree on FamilySearch
Saturday, December 9, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Family Tree Maker (FTM) Users Group, with Reiley Kidd and Betty Ravenholt, leaders
Saturday, December 16, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Irish SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, December 16, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, German SIG, with Jean Roth
JANUARY
Saturday, January 6, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, Family Tree Interest Group, Lou Daly, leader of this special interest group exploring all the features of the tool Family Tree on FamilySearch
Saturday, January 13, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, Second Saturday Speaker Series, “Chinese Exclusion Act Files – Original Documents at NARA” will be presented by Trish Nicola
Sunday, January 14, 1:30pm – 3:00pm, Scandinavian SIG, with Karen Knudson
Saturday, January 20, 10:15am – 12:15pm, Irish SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, January 20, 1:00pm – 2:30pm, German SIG, with Jean Roth
Saturday, January 27, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, DNA SIG, this group meets at the Wedgwood Presbyterian Church, 8008 35th Ave NE, Seattle. For more information contact SGSDNASIG@gmail.com Co-chaired by Cary Bright and Herb McDaniel.