Genealogy Talks and Journals

Whew!  I finally have a chance to come up for air!  I've given four genealogy talks this month, which I realize isn't that many, but three of them were brand-new ones I was doing for the first time, so there's been a lot of last-minute running around, looking for the right graphics, finalizing handouts, and generally tweaking the presentations.  On the positive side, all of the talks went well (yay!), so the time invested in them was worth it, and I now have presentations on probate records, city and other directories, and deaths in San Francisco.  Unfortunately, the time spent on preparing the talks came at the expense of writing for my blog, so now I have a backlog of articles.  I'm going to have to work on catching up!

Something else that kept me busy was finishing the most recent issues of  The Baobab Tree and ZichronNote.  I didn't quite get them out on schedule as I had hoped, but I was close!  The summer issue of Baobab includes articles on the history of black mariners and resources for researching them; some information on the life and history of the first black resident of Antioch, California; personal memories about a relative who portrayed marketing icon Aunt Jemima at public events; and an introduction to the journal of a doctor in the British Royal Navy in the 19th century, with his observations on race and the slave trade.

The August issue of ZichronNote includes four pieces about the annual IAJGS conference, which took place this year in Salt Lake City:  commentary from several SFBAJGS members about their experiences, President Jeremy Frankel's commentary on the conference in general and on the annual business meeting and election in particular, and winners of the annual awards (ZichronNote unfortunately being beaten in the society journal category by Lineage, the newsletter of the JGS of Long Island).  Jeremy also wrote about a genealogical puzzle that took him 29 years to solve, and there is a thoughtful article about growing up with a grandfather who was a Torah scribe.

My usual caveat about these informative journals is that you have to be a member of the respective societies to receive them.  So if these articles sound interesting to you, visit the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society (for ZichronNote) and the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (for The Baobab Tree) to join and you can be reading them soon.

And I realize I have not written yet about the Minnie Driver episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, but I ran into a problem:  I always review an episode to make sure I didn't miss anything, and my cable provider did not have the episode available on demand.  So I'm still working on that too.