RJFN: 16 Nov to 22 Nov

Things have been busy lately so not a lot of genealogy or blogging recently.  I'm hopeful that because of the Thanksgiving holiday (Thanksgivings are pretty small and casual at my house) I'll have time for some genealogy this week but we'll see.

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I stumbled upon a new resource which turned out to be a great find.  On a lark I decided to punch in John Clements and much to my surprise his obituary came up.  The site has many Pennsylvania Civil War obits, not just John's, so it is worth a look.  His obituary wasn't the goldmine I was hoping it would be but it did have some new info in it.  One thing that confuses (and kind of worries me) is that according to the obit, his family came to the US in 1854 yet they were in the 1850 census.  I'm still about 95% sure that the John Clement's who was in the Civil War and whose obit I just found is the same as my Elizabeth Clemens' brother but this new date discrepancy is still cause to pause and think.

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I'd been reading the buzz about DAR's indexes going online and decided to check it out.  I haven't really thought about pursuing a DAR membership because of all the work involved and because it seemed like every time I found a possible candidate it went bust after just a little digging.  But last August I found some church records which pretty firmly established the parentage of one of my brick walls.  I did a little digging and found some trees which had a lot on the family, including mention of the fact that there were two (maybe more) Revolutionary soldiers in the line of descent.  I'd been meaning to confirm the info in these trees but hadn't gotten around to it.  Turns out that both of them are in the DAR indexes!  I plan on doing more work on my Thomas Collins and George Sherman/Shearman and possibly pursuing a DAR membership (but not in the near future).  Anyway, it is certainly food for thought.

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I had a lot of fun doing research for Bill's local poets challenge.  I'm a little ashamed to admit that I didn't know much about California's poetic history before this challenge.  But I ended up learning a lot and now have several new favorite poets!  The one I wrote about, Joaquin Miller, is my favorite new find and one I highly recommend checking out. 

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Since my old desktop crashed and burned last month, the only family tree program I've had access to has been my online Ancestry trees.  Now, I had all the free programs downloaded on my old computer and I used them once in awhile, but my online trees have always been the main ones I worked out of.  I'm excited to try the new Roots Magic Essentials though and I'm hoping to make the transition to it from my online trees (which have terribly erratic sourcing!).  I've used Family Tree Builder to make and read GEDCOMS and quite liked it and I also had PAF on my old computer, though I never worked with it much (I also had the free version of Legacy which never really floated my boat, sorry to fans of the program).  I might try Family Tree Builder again, but first I'd like to try this new program on the block.  Once I get a tree set-up on it, I'll write a review though I'm sure there will be many reviews of it in coming weeks.

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My blog of the week this time is Handwritten Recipes.  The premise of the blog is similar to that of its companion site, Forgotten Bookmarks except the emphasis is on recipes here.  Many of the recipes featured sound interesting, especially the blueberry muffins one (too bad they apparently didn't taste as good as they look!).

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