Category Archives: Society News

Eastside Genealogical Society German Interest Group

by Charles Hansen

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/  .

Bainbridge Island Genealogical Society (BIGS) December Meeting

by Charles Hansen

  The Bainbridge Island Genealogical Society (BIGS) will meet Friday, Dec. 15, 2017, at the LDS church (gym) on Bainbridge Island, 8677 Madison Ave, from 10:00a.m. – 12 noon. Join us for the BIGS Holiday Genealogy Fest: Family Treasures “Show and Tell”, Door Prizes, Research Resources Swap, and Refreshments”. Free to members, a $5.00 donation is suggested for nonmembers. For more information go to http://www.bigenealogy.org or call 206-780-8009. BIGS is a 501c(3) non-profit organization.
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Thank you!
Sue Elfving
Bainbridge Island Genealogical Society
Director of Publicity and Public Relations

Jewish Genealogical Society Upcoming Meetings

by Charles Hansen

From Matches in a List to Family: Case Studies in DNA” “by Mary Kathryn Kozy, Genealogical Lecturer

DATE:  Monday, December 11, 2017

LDS Factoria Building
4200 124th Ave SE
Bellevue, WA  98006

   Doors open at 6:30 p.m., for all to enjoy the extensive JGSWS Library’s genealogical resources!

   Free Wi-Fi available

  Presentation starts promptly at 7:15 p.m.

  Free admission and refreshments

ABOUT OUR PROGRAM:  As more and more people decide to DNA test, the bigger our match lists become! With somewhere close to eight million people in the test pool amongst the four major companies, we have many more matches to deal with. What does one DO with them all? How can we organize them? What are the best practices for sorting them out, especially when dealing with endogamous populations? This lecture will focus somewhat on the use of various tools at the DNA testing companies, but will also deal with several case studies in actually finding the relationships between various unknown individuals. What if the DNA match has no tree? Is it hopeless? Absolutely not! Come learn some tips and techniques for taking those matches and turning them into family.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER:   Mary Kathryn Kozy has been working on her own family history for over 35 years. She has researched families from the Midwest to the Deep South and from both Western and Eastern Europe. She has served in multiple positions in several local societies and on the state level. She currently serves on the board of the JGSWS, serves as a part-time LDS Family History missionary, and speaks to many groups in the area. Mary is married, the mother of three wonderful children and two grandchildren. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both Zoology and Information Technology & Systems and has completed three certificate programs with the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. She has also completed the ProGen program with an eye toward certification as a professional genealogist.

“Reclaim The Records: Genealogy Fought the Law and Won” (How to Use State Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogy) , presented by Brooke Schreier Ganz

DATE:  Monday, January 8, 2018

LDS Factoria Building
4200 124th Ave SE
Bellevue, WA  98006

    Doors open at 6:30 p.m., for all to enjoy the extensive JGSWS Library’s genealogical resources!

    Free Wi-Fi available

   Presentation starts promptly at 7:15 p.m.

   Free admission and refreshments

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

Tri-City Genealogical Society December Meeting

by Charles Hansen

 

Our December 13th meeting will be at the Benton County PUD Auditorium in Kennewick on the corner of Hwy #395 and 10th Street.
Beginning Genealogy Class: Genealogy Education – 6:15 p.m. to 6:45 p.m.
Program: 7:00 p.m.
Show Off Your Heritage
 
Members and guests are asked to bring items about your family heritage/history as well as what you interests you have.
1. Photographs
2. Documents
3. Family heirlooms, antiques
4. Hobbies, collections or recreation interests
Your legacy will one day be handed down to your children/grandchildren/great-grandchildren and they will want to know what hobbies and collections you had as a child/teenager or as an adult. So, bring whatever you use to collect or still collect or photographs or a sample of what you use to collect as a kid/young adult.
You can display your family photographs and documents on a poster or a tri-fold or on the table.
This will be a fun event for everyone to have a glimpse of your family history as well as the antiques/heirlooms, hobbies and collections that you either inherited or have or previously engaged in.
Heather Murphy will bring her “ShotBox” to demonstrate as well as for anyone to use, so please bring your own cell phone or a smart phone which may be even better. Please bring your own photos/small items to be photographed. For more information/description of the ShotBox, please see their website:
Sandra Floberg will bring her “Flip-Pal” to demonstrate which is another “must see” tool. You can visit the website which is:
Refreshments:
Please bring homemade or store bought cookies, candies, fudge, muffins, quick breads (banana, zucchini, apple, pumpkin), cake, etc.  Beverages of water and/or 7-up/Sherbet will be provided.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thank you for your continued interest in TCGS.
Art Kelly

Seattle Genealogical Society News

by Charles Hansen

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/public/guides/pptax.htm

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/VirginiaTaxListCensuses/

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.

Kittitas County Genealogical Society Holiday Dinner

by Charles Hansen

The KCGS will continue the tradition of having an annual holiday dinner. It is now planned for Monday, December 4, at 6 pm, at the First Methodist Church.The meal is prepared and served by members of the church and will cost $14 this year. The event usually includes musical entertainment and sharing of small gifts. Members and guests are welcome to attend. Reservations are due by Nov. 27 and may be made by mail—to 413 N. Main, Ellensburg, 98926 or by calling the library during office hours—Monday to Wednesday from 10am to 4 pm.

Eastern Washington Genealogical Society Christmas Party

by Charles Hansen

Saturday, December 2
Christmas Party – celebrating The Famous and Infamous  (EWGS Meetings)
12:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Spokane Public Library Auditorium, Downtown Spokane
Do you have a famous or infamous ancestor, or know of an interesting local person?
For example: Great Uncle Harry was a Bigamist? Horse Thief? Inventor? Spy? Soldier? Hero? Scholar? Author? Movie Star? Tell us a story ..
Did you know Klondike Kate lived in Spokane for a time?
Did Butch Cassidy really retire and live in Spokane under an alias?
Who was Willy Wiley?
Share a story and a picture or two from a newspaper article or other source. Visual aids are great!
Please bring your plate of Christmas cookies and a story to share at our December Holiday event.
Casual holiday attire is recommended but not required.
December is a time to tell a tale, eat some delicious cookies and have a great time.
Hope to see you there!!
If you have questions or suggestions please contact Mary Holcomb:   mkholcomb@live.com