52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge 51 - Goals for 2011

Sina Harriet Bellinger Kelly

On New Year's Day, I'll be posting my "Bucket List" for 2011. I'm much more comfortable with that approach than coming up with some New Year's resolutions or a lengthy To Do list with items that may never get checked off.

Week 51 of the 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy, a series of prompts created for the geneablogging community by Amy Coffin of We Tree Genealogy, offers this challenge:


Think about the goals you want to accomplish next year and write them down. What research steps do you want to take? What records would you like to find? Think about the brick walls you’d like knocked down. 

In August, I wrote a post called Getting to Know My Grandmother after having been inspired by Lisa Alzo's presentation on Finding Your Female Ancestors at the Midwest Family History Expo in Kansas City. Something she said still resonates with me: "Give voice to the stories of the silent women from our past."


It was then that I realized there wasn't a whole lot that I know about my grandmother, Sina Harriet Bellinger Kelly. I have memories of her, even though she died when I was just five years old. I want 2011 to be the year when I get to know her better.


To accomplish this, I will gather all the photographs I have of her. There aren't that many because she had a habit of cutting her face out of photographs! I am optimistic that reading through the microfilm versions of the Greenwood Gazette (Greenwood, Nebraska) at the Nebraska State Historical Society will yield some newspaper articles that might give me some insight to her daily life and social interactions. I will seek out a copy of the record of her marriage to my grandfather, William Leroy Kelly.


Since I wanted to change the look of LongLostRelatives.net for 2011, I changed the header. It was a conscious decision to put a photograph of 17 year old Sina Bellinger at the top of the page - as a daily reminder to me about the major research goal I want to accomplish during the year.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #45 - Genealogy Societies - my Nebraska societies

This week's challenge in Geneabloggers' 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy is to examine genealogy societies in your region.

This is a challenge I'm quite excited about because there are several societies and organizations in my area that provide wonderful resources and events.

Lincoln-Lancaster County Genealogical Society, (LLCGS) Lincoln, Nebraska

I consider this my "home" society. Not only do I live here, but I feel that as a genealogist I am very fortunate because my maternal ancestors and family have been in the area since the early 1870s and my father's family has been here since the mid 1920s. It means that a lot of my family history is within arms reach at all times.

Society meetings are held at 7:15 p.m. on the second Tuesday of every month and meet at the Dick Administration Building at Union College. Business meetings and announcements are followed by an informative and educational presentation on some aspect of genealogy or family history research.

The resource I find most valuable to my research is the society's searchable online database that contains information about cemeteries and marriages. I can't even begin to count the number of my family members for whom I've located burial or marriage information. In the case of marriage records, the search result will provide the book and page number where the record can be found in the Lancaster county marriage records. Cemetery records provide a link to the page of the society's cemetery index publication.

When it comes to publications, here is a list of those developed and offered for sale by the society.

The society's library is located at the Union College Library, 3800 South 48th Street in Lincoln. The library includes materials on Lancaster county and the city of Lincoln, exchange newsletters and quarterlies, research guides on specific topics and geographic areas.

The society sponsors conferences in which nationally recognized speakers are brought in. The most recent was last month's presentation by John Colletta. The society also publishes a monthly newsletter. Society members teach beginning and intermediate genealogy classes at Southeast Community College.

Presently, individual membership is $15 and a family membership is $20.

Greater Omaha Genealogical Society (GOGS),  Omaha, Nebraska

I'm in my first year of membership in GOGS and just last weekend attended my first conference sponsored by the society. Since many of my relatives lived in Omaha, Douglas County, Cass County and Sarpy County, this society provides resources to aid in my research in those areas. The society's blog, linked above, serves as the society's web site.

Society meetings are held at 7:00 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month except July, August and December at the Crown Point Retirement Center, 2820 S. 80th Street in Omaha.

At this time, membership is $20 for individuals or $25 for family. The society publishes a newsletter and provides announcements via email. The society offers free workshops, research library lock-ins, publications, member discounts on conferences, and a tape rental library. Genealogical resources are housed at the W. Dale Clark Library in Omaha.

Publications available from the Society are listed on the web site.

Now, on to the really good stuff! The Society has provided an amazing resource of event indexes on the web. On each of the following links, the index is located by alphabetical letter on the right side of the screen.

Omaha Births - these have been extracted from newspaper obituaries. Copies of the birth announcement are available from the Society for $5.

Omaha Marriages and Anniversaries - This is an index to the marriage records available on microfilm at the W. Dale Clark Library.

Omaha Obituaries - now has more than 200,000 listings!

Cass County marriages - this is of great interest to me as many of my ancestors settled and lived here. Copies are available for $5.

Sarpy County marriages - more than 9,000 listings at this writing.

The Society's indexes now also extend well outside of the greater Omaha area with the following listings:

Brown County marriages - more than 2,500 listings at this writing.

Hall County marriages - more than 4,500 listings at this writing.

Rock County marriages - more than 4,000 listings at this writing.

Thurston County marriages - nearly 2,000 listings at this writing. Source of many Native American names

Wayne County marriages - more than 1,000 listings at this writing.

Nebraska State Genealogical Society

This is another society membership that I treasure. The state society has a web site and a page on Facebook. The Society also has the Tombstone Photo Project which now has more than 55,000 entries.

Society membership is $20 for individual or $23 for family. This includes subscriptions to the quarterly publications, Nebraska Ancestree and the NewBrassKey. Membership also gives you access to the members only portion of the web site which includes three decades worth of Nebraska Ancestree publications. Yes, I've found some information on my family there!

The Society sponsors an annual conference. This year's conference in Norfolk featured two full days with Paula Stuart-Warren. The next annual conference will be held May 6 - 7, 2011 in Nebraska City.

The Society is also collaborating with Ancestry.com on the Nebraska newspaper digitization project.

The book library of the Society is housed at the Beatrice Public Library, 100 North 16th Street in Beatrice.

Members whose families settled in Nebraska may apply for a Pioneer Family of Nebraska certificate if their family settled here between 1868 and 1879. First Family certificates are an option if your ancestors settled here before 1867. Century Family recognition is for those whose ancestors settled in Nebraska at least 100 years prior to the submission of the application. I just realized that my ancestors fit all three categories!

Society resources include a variety of Nebraska, county and newspaper records on microfilm that can be checked out.

In addition to these genealogical societies, I also hold membership in the Cass County Historical Society Museum in Plattsmouth and the Nebraska State Historical Society. The Nebraska State Historical Society's blog is absolutely one of my favorites to follow. It always has great photos and stories from the museum's collection. The society is also active on Facebook.

When a person has access to such great resources, it's easy to take them for granted. None of these societies would be what they are today without the work of their team of dedicated volunteers and members. My heartfelt thanks to all of those people who keep these societies, their libraries and archives viable resources for researchers.


52 Weeks To Better Genealogy is a series of weekly prompts that are a bit more challenging and are geared towards those new to the field of genealogy and family history as well as those who want to brush up on some skills which might be a bit rusty.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge # 33 - Twitter

I'm a couple weeks behind in posting my experiences on the Twitter challenge in 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy. The challenge was to monitor Twitter twice a day for seven days; examine the information being exchanged and learn how to control the incoming information.


For whatever reason, this was not that easy a challenge for me. Last month, I watched as my fellow geneabloggers tweeted from the Family History Expo in Kansas City. I tried to follow along, but just couldn't quite grasp how Twitter works.


When the 52 Weeks challenge came up, I figured that I could do this for one week. I got an account on Twitter and started to follow a few of my online genealogy friends. I downloaded Tweet Deck, which I found helped me manage the incoming information much better than on the Twitter site. After the seven days were over, I wasn't impressed and posted a comment on Facebook that said "Bye Bye Blue Birdie."


But - I didn't close out my Twitter account. I continued to check the messages a couple times a day. I still find it difficult to follow conversations - they don't appear to be threaded the way I'm used to seeing on message boards or even Facebook. But if I don't check in, I think that I might be missing something. For example, I really enjoyed reading the tweets from the people attending the Family History Expo in Salt Lake City this weekend. That's #FHexpo on Twitter in case you didn't know.


While browsing books at Barnes and Noble this week, I noticed there were a couple books on using Twitter and Facebook for marketing. These were thick books! So I thought there must be something more to this Twitter thing than 140 characters. I didn't buy the books. In fact, I didn't even look at them. But the size of them made me rethink "the Twitter thing."


Even though I am not enamored with Twitter (yet), I am a proponent of social media as a resource in aiding genealogical research. So I started to do some tweeting and retweeting. I have no idea why anyone is following me, but they are! So, just to tie LongLostRelatives.net into my Twitter account, I've added a widget to the blog that displays my most recent tweets. I've always been a believer in keeping content fresh on web sites, so having the live Twitter feed on this blog made sense.


I may have gone into this kicking and screaming and complaining, but I'm on Twitter and I'm probably going to stick around for a while. So if you want to follow me, come on over to http://twitter.com/sooznebr

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge #32 - RSS Feeds

If you read a lot of genealogy blogs, it can be very time consuming to visit each one individually to see if any new items have been added. The best way to read all of your favorite blogs in one place is by using an RSS reader. What is RSS? RSS stands for "really simple syndication" and that's exactly what it is.

My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader. Earlier this summer, I wrote about my use of Google Reader for genealogy. Rather than repeat information from that post, I've decided to share some additional add-on tools that make RSS even easier.

My web browser of choice these days is Google Chrome because of its speed in loading pages. When I come across a blog that I want to subscribe to, I open Google Reader, click on the "Add a Subscription" button and paste in the web address of the blog. Presto. It's there.

RSS extenstion tool for browsers

I admit to being impatient when it comes to web browsing. I wanted something on my Chrome toolbar where I could immediately add a blog to my reader on the spot. I searched for "Add RSS Feed" and discovered this handy RSS extension tool. A quick installation and it's ready to go. This tool will identify any page that provides an RSS feed. The RSS feed logo appears right in the address bar of your browser. Want to subscribe? Just click on the logo and it's done. Anything that saves time and clicks gets points from me.

Share tool bar in Google Reader

I'm really not sure what this feature in Google Reader is called, but it has become my other new best friend. This is at the bottom of every blog post that appears in Google Reader.

Once you've read a blog post, it seems to disappear from your Google Reader. I love this tool bar because it's an easy way for me to be able to retrieve favorite posts to read again later. "Add tags" is an especially nice feature. You can categorize posts and then create a special feed to embed on your blog or web site to be able to share some of your favorites with friends or blog readers.

How can you apply this to your blogging? Since I now have two blogs, I've added the embedded html code to add the "tagged" items from my Google Reader into my blog. This way, I can (hopefully) generate interest in my Nothing But Tombstones blog by displaying a feed on my LongLostRelatives.net blog and vice-versa.

The toolbar also lets you share by email, star an item, keep it unread, and more. Try out each feature and decide which ones work for you.

Have the freedom to experiment and try all of the features of Google Reader. If you have some suggestions to add, please add a comment below.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy is a series of weekly prompts that are a bit more challenging and are geared towards those new to the field of genealogy and family history as well as those who want to brush up on some skills which might be a bit rusty.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge 31 - podcasts

This week's challenge in 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy was to listen to a podcast. A few weeks ago, I had downloaded several episodes (would you believe 384 of them?) to my new netbook, with the idea it would be nice to have them available when I wanted to listen. It's always been difficult for me to listen to something while I'm writing or doing research, so I had to change my strategy on this.

I loaded about 30 hours worth of podcasts onto one of my mp3 players in preparation for this challenge. I already have another mp3 player filled with a variety of audio books. It's amazing how many audio books you can "read" just commuting and doing errands. So now I have one player for audio books and another just for podcasts.

This morning I took off on my walk and cranked up an episode of Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems. The episode that came up was #78 from early in 2010. Lisa talked about her new grandson, shared some email from listeners, shared information about the podcast and a few other odds and ends. She's very personable and sounds like she's talking with you, not from a script. It was very enjoyable and made my walk seem to go so much faster.

Later this afternoon, I had a lot of dead time while waiting for an appointment. Rather than sit around looking at a magazine in which I had no interest, I pulled out the mp3 player and listened to some more of the podcast. Yes, just filling in those empty spaces of my day with genealogy podcasts is definitely a good plan. That little mp3 player will be with me all the time now. For the next several weeks, Lisa will be my walking companion!

Even though I was familiar with podcasts before, this challenge allowed me to better focus the way in which I listen to them.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy is a series of weekly prompts that are a bit more challenging and are geared towards those new to the field of genealogy and family history as well as those who want to brush up on some skills which might be a bit rusty.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge #28 - Patents and Trademarks

Do you have Patience for Patents?

This week's challenge in 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy is to spend some time with patents and trademarks. The two sites recommended for use were the U.S. Patent and Trademark office and Google Patent Search.

I had little patience for the U.S. Patent Office web site. There were just too many links to wade through, so I returned to my good friend Google and tried its patent search for the first time. I typed in a couple family names with no results, then remembered that the brother-in-law of my great-grandmother was an inventor. I typed in the surname "Garrigus" and got a result that I will gladly add to my genealogy research.

Clarence Garrigus was, indeed, an inventor. Earlier this year, I learned that he had developed the Universal Breadmixer in 1903. He and his wife, Agnes Welch Garrigus, used their kitchen as a laboratory to develop the product. His obituary stated that during the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904, Garrigus passed out samples of bread made with the mixer from his wife's recipe.

A quick search and there on the computer screen in front of me was the drawing for Clarence's Dough Mixer, No. 736,956 patented August 25, 1903.

I found several more of Clarence Garrigus' patents. Another one that interested me was his Vibration Eliminator for Phonograph Turntables in 1929.

That patent application begins "The invention relates to sound translating apparatus as utilized in the recording and reproduction of sound, more especially a turntable for supporting and rotating a suitable disk record or blank and to which table rotational movement is communicated through an intermediate shaft from a suitable driving member, as a spring or electric motor."

That makes me wonder what Clarence would have thought about CDs and mp3s!

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge # 27 - The Inventors of Greenwood, Nebraska

This week's challenge in "52 weeks to Better Genealogy" was to try our skills using Google Scholar. I was aware of this search tool but had not yet used it. When my search turned up titles such as "Reaction of Benzocyclobutnoxides With Nitrates: Synthesis of Hypecumine and Other 3-Substituted Isoquinolines" I wasn't sure if I was up to this challenge!

A few surname searches didn't turn up any of my ancestors, so I thought I'd try searching on Greenwood, Nebraska, the little village northeast of Lincoln where many of my ancestors settled.

To my surprise, I discovered that Greenwood had spawned some inventors. 

On May 1, 1883, Walter Trumbull received a patent for his improvement to windmills.

On June 11, 1889, William Carr received a patent on his ironing table.

On June 4, 1901, John Stradley of Greenwood received a patent for his corn sheller.

On June 11, 1907, W. Dean received a patent on his dropping device - which is a system for planting corn at regular intervals.

And on December 27, 1910, Sterling McDonald received a patent on his cuspidor. I don't know if that one ever took off because 40 years later, my grandfather Bill Kelly was still using a Hills Brothers coffee can for his spitoon!

While I doubt if I make as much use of Google Scholar as I do of Google Books, it's nice to know that it's there if I need to know about the taphonomy and population dynamics of an early Pliocene vertebrate fauna.

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge # 26

Our task this week was to explore Google Books from a non-genealogy research perspective to learn more about the tool and how we might use it.

The Classics

Even though I’ve read a lot of books for as far back as I can remember, I’ve often thought there were some classics that never made it on to my reading list. Seeing “The Classics” listed on Google books seemed like a good place to start this week's challenge.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – The entire play is available on Google Books. In high school, I opted to see the film starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey. I struggled with Richard III and still can’t tell you what it was about. And I preferred Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet over Mel Gibson’s. So I guess I never actually read that much Shakespeare, even though I bought a used copy of his complete works on Bookins a while back. Nice to know his work is available online.

Other Classics available on Google Books:

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

Jules Verne – Around the World in 80 Days (again, saw the movie – the original one with David Niven)

Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – there is an illustrated version that has beautiful artwork.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby – This is probably still my favorite piece of fiction – a limited number of pages are available on Google Books. Since discovering one of the branches of my family tree lived on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota just a few blocks from Fitzgerald, I’ve had a renewed interest in going back and re-reading some of his books.  On Google Books, I discovered an earlier published version of The Great Gatsby called Trimalchio. Fascinating!

Mark Twain – Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi

Mari Sandoz – Cheyenne Autumn and Capital City

It is very clear, that with Google Books, you can always have a library on your laptop.

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy - Challenge 20

I was definitely up for the challenge this week to locate some Bureau of Land Management Records. In less than three minutes, I had three hits on members of my Pecht family.

First up was a land record for Albert B. Pecht in Sundance, Wyoming. He had made full payment for the north half of the northeast quarter and the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter of section nineteen and the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of section eighteen in township fifty-three north of range sixty-five west of the sixth principal meridian, containing one hundred sixty acres.  This was dated October 15, 1919.

What was that again??

Albert's brother, Sherman Pecht, paid for Section five in Township twenty-one north of Range thirty-two west of the Sixth Principal Meridian, Nebraska, containing six hundred forty and eighty-hundreds acres. This was dated August 21, 1919.

Sherman's son, Clarence Pecht, claimed Section nine in Township twenty-one north of Range thirty-two west of the Sixth Principal Meridian, Nebraska, containing six hundred forty acres. This was dated October 15, 1919.


Now that I have this information, I need to figure out what to do with it!