Research Notes : February 18, 2015

Research has been limited lately with work commitments and other more pressing matters, but did manage to sneak in a bit of family history research so far this week:

• On President's Day, took advantage of a day off from work to visit the Jay County Historical Society Museum, where I copied the original probate estate packets for Luman Walker Lemasters, George W. Haley, George Haley, John Metzner and John Adam Metzner.  This will give me a ton of stuff to sort through and plenty of fodder for future posts.  Plus, spent time with my dad and visited my aunts and uncles in Portland.

• Continue to work through my RootsMagic database, correcting the Quaker dates that I had originally adding in the system with only the year for the date and included month & date with the place. Ex : 1815 (8mo 3d) New Garden MM.  I was unaware that the database can handle the date sort in the correct order, and have been working through a query that looks for any place name with a parenthesis in it to make corrections.  At the same time, I am eliminating county names with the place names I had for the monthly meetings, as many encompassed more than one county.  Now the place name will simply say "New Garden Monthly Meeting, North Carolina".

• Watched the latest episode of "Genealogy Roadshow" this week on PBS.  I thought the best story was the first one, where the women found out that her grandmother's family had helped Jews escape from Austria - and that they actually were cousins of her family.  Why do so many families continue to keep secrets?