Meeting Notes from February 28, 2008

Genealogy Focus Group Feb 28, 2008


Cathy Pappas
Cathy Graupner
Jim Julian
Vivian Martin
Nancy Grimes
Curtis Wright

MaryEllen memichael@fredco-md.net

Welcome to our new visitors, Vivian and Nancy. We spent some time with introductions and Curt gave us a quick overview of the FCPL sites that are available for genealogy research.

Vivian and Nancy are sisters exploring genealogy research, trying to figure out just what it is all about. Their family has some genealogy documents generated by other family members and they are thinking they might like to expand on the existing work. One of their family names is Dinterman. They were particularly looking for Roy C. Dinterman of Creagerstown (Rock Ridge) born in 1893. We were able to find Roy pretty quickly using the standard census search in Ancestry.com. We encountered the “small world” phenomenon when we found Annie Pittenger, a relative of Cathy Pappas, living in the household of one of the Dinterman relatives, a Stambaugh family, in 1920.

We talked a bit about some of the software available for tracking genealogy information. There is the ever-popular Family Tree Maker from Ancestry.com but it is a product that must be purchased. The LDS (www.familysearch.org) site, has free software for download. It is Personal Ancestry File, a free database package. Both Family Tree Maker and Personal Ancestry File will support the GED format file for transferring information between databases for easy sharing if data. Both of these packages have the excellent feature of filling in known genealogy links from the LDS database in Salt Lake City. One feature of Family Tree Maker is an automatic merge function so if you have two branches that turn out to belong to the same branch, the software will merge the entries for you. We do not have anyone currently using the Personal Ancestry File software so we don’t have detailed information on the features.

I distributed a list I am working on to identify all the genealogy resources at Emmitsburg Branch library. After looking it over, Jim Julian identified at least one book that was missing from the list. The Handybook for Genealogists, published by Everton’s, is an excellent resource he donated to the library in 2006 and I was happy he noticed it was missing from the list so we could get it cataloged correctly. Unfortunately, the book had not been identified as a gift to the library so we were able to correct that oversight. The list I am working on is a work in progress. I updated it from a very old and out-dated list and I am still trying to add the newer resources that we have on our shelves like Jim’s book.

Cathy G. brought her personal copy of the book, Pioneers of the Monacacy and recommended it as a resource. We do have that book at Emmitsburg in our reference section. Cathy also brought a very special document from her grandfather’s estate. Her grandfather, George Konig, was a United States Congressmen from the 3rd Congressional District who died in 1913. Each congressman is given a book commemorating his/her funeral and Cathy has her grandfather’s book. It is in excellent condition and makes a wonderful addition to her genealogy treasure chest.

It was another fun get together. See you next time – March 27th.