Tonight's Meeting: Featuring You!

Thursday, April 17, 2014

5:45 p.m.

Margaret Troke Library

502 W. Benjamin Holt Drive, Stockton

Round Table Discussions:

Breaking Through Our Brick Walls Together!

Returning to our meeting line-up after its successful inception last year is our Round Table Discussion, an interactive learning session featuring you as speaker!

Anyone who has spent time researching family history eventually comes to that one ancestor whose story seems impossible to trace. We call those instances our “Brick Walls.”

Using the power of collective effort during this month’s meeting, we’ll pool our resources to break through those brick walls. Through informal small round table discussions, we’ll use these cases to help each other find answers to our most challenging research problems.

To prepare for our April 17 meeting, SJGS members have already completed an online survey, allowing us to select the following four topics for discussion:

Research in New England: where to find those elusive documents

Tracing Ancestors to Europe through clues in passenger lists, immigration and naturalization forms

Headed West: Tips on researching Midwest and Western Territories and States

Finding Online Resources: Places to look online for lists, archives, and documents

Tonight, come meet and help your fellow Society members! Share experiences and techniques you’ve used to find elusive ancestors. It does not matter if you are a beginner, a seasoned genealogist, or haven’t even found a “brick wall” yet (you will!). Bring any information you already have about your mystery ancestor, his or her family and descendants—this might provide some clues. We can all learn something from each other, while also getting to know each other better.

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A New Venture: Workshops in Lodi

The San Joaquin Genealogical Society is beginning a new project: providing genealogy workshops in the city of Lodi, California. Although the Society has been providing training to patrons of the Margaret Troke branch library in Stockton, our goal is to reach out to other libraries within San Joaquin County with training sessions in beginning genealogy for their local patrons, too.

Our first session at the Lodi Public Library is an introduction to genealogy, "Digging Up Your Roots: Researching Your Ancestors." Today's session is the first of a two-part series, with the follow-up session on Saturday, May 10, focusing on free online resources for genealogical research.

Join us today, from 2:00 to 4:00 this afternoon, in the Community Room of the Lodi Library, at 201 West Locust Street. For more information, you may reach the library at 209 333 5503, or by email at referencelib@lodi.gov.

Join Us For Another Beginners' Workshop

Saturday, April 5, 2014

11:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

Margaret Troke Library

502 W. Benjamin Holt Drive, Stockton

The San Joaquin Genealogical Society is presenting another in its continuing Beginners' Workshop Series for this Spring with its upcoming class this Saturday. The April 5 presentation at the Troke Branch Library will be on Basic Internet Family History Research.

In this session, you will learn how to find and use the best free and inexpensive genealogical websites, including Ancestry Library Edition and FamilySearch. Join us to find out which search terms get the best results; how to find distant relatives through social networking sites; and how to order copies of distant county records, or access immigration, ethnic and foreign information and images.

This one-hour training session will be followed by time to consult with SJGS members about your genealogy research questions. Be sure to bring whatever data you have for this one-on-one session: birth, marriage, death dates of ancestors, and where they lived. To access the wi-fi that is available for this workshop session, you may either bring your own laptop or tablet, or use one of the library's laptop computers.

Since space is limited for this workshop session, pre-registration is required. Stop in at Troke Library and sign up for this April 5 workshop at the reference desk. You may also reserve your place by calling the library at (209) 937-8221, or by emailing your reservation directly to the Society at sjcogensoc@gmail.com.