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September Membership Meeting

Saturday, September 13, 2008
1:00 p.m.
California Genealogical Society Library
2201 Broadway at 22nd, Oakland.

Best Bet Web sites for Genealogical Research

Genealogist and author Ron Arons will explore the many “best bet” Web sites that allow researchers to find materials online, including historical documents, newspapers and articles, living people, maps and photos, foreign language translators and aids and more. He will provide numerous examples of how the Internet has worked for him.

Ron will also slip in some tales from his new book, The Jews of Sing Sing, described as “the true story of Jewish gangsters and other shady characters who served time ‘up the river’ and the New York Jewish community’s response.” His interest in Jewish inmates started when he discovered that his great-grandfather served four years at the famous prison. Be sure to read Dick Eastman’s glowing review of Ron’s book and watch Dick’s interview with Ron for RootsTelevision.

Ron Arons has earned degrees from Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and is a member of both the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society. Arons has traced his roots to England, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. A recipient of the 2005 Hackman Research Residency Award, his current research focuses on both famous and lesser-known Jewish criminals.

Please note that the short membership meeting starts promptly at 1:00 p.m. Ron’s talk follows at 1:30 p.m. He will be available afterwards to autograph and sell books.

Rose Pierson of FamilySearch Indexing sent some statistics on the San Francisco Mortuary Project. She will be sending reports weekly.

The project includes 38,837 total images in 3,883 total batches.

After 24 hours:

814 total images have been indexed (81 batches)
1560 images checked out for A indexing (156 batches)
1140 images checked out for B indexing (114 batches)

I found time to process a couple of batches. The records were from 1895 (pre-earthquake!) and included one child who died at age 8 of tubercular meningitis. With the missing 1890 census, this is a child who never appeared in a U.S. census. The record gave her mother’s name, another name that may be a sister and a note that she was placed in a vault in May 1895 and shipped to Albuquerque, New Mexico the next January (1896). Good stuff!

In a cooperative effort with SFgenealogy.com, the San Francisco Public Library, the Genealogical Society of Utah and FamilySearch Indexing, the California Genealogical Society is pleased to announce the start of the San Francisco Mortuary Records Indexing Project. The project is the culmination of two years’ work by the entities involved, to bring the digital images of thousands of mortuary records, stored by the Halsted Gray Mortuary in San Francisco, to researchers all over the world. The records are a significant genealogical find because of the richness of their detail and the miraculous way they survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

The records include the complete holdings of the first mortuary in San Francisco, undertakers N. Gray & Co., from the day it opened – July 1, 1850. In all, the project includes the surviving records, up to 1920, of several mortuaries that merged with either Halsted or Gray, over the years. The records include notations from financial ledgers, cemetery records, removal records and headstone notations. Many have obituary clippings.

Rose Pierson of Family Search Indexing has been working diligently to ready the project for volunteers. The CGS project is now listed on the Current Projects page (scroll down to the bottom and look for the CGS logo.)

The Project Home Page gives three digital examples of how the records look and has a link to project-specific indexing instructions. Please take advantage of the training tutorials located under the “Help” tab.

I’ll have more to say about the project in the coming days and I will report on my own indexing experience. (I did some beta testing and I guarantee you will be thrilled with the kind of information you will find.) I encourage everyone to use the comments section at the bottom of this post to let us know about your experience in the project.

Report On the First 24 Hours – July 22, 2008

Update – Friday, August 1, 2008

Update – February 11, 2011. Watch the YouTube video about our project!