Society Saturday: New Blog Team Member

Root Cellar Sacramento Genealogical Society is pleased to introduce Richard (Rick) Hanson as the newest member of its Technology Committee.  Rick will be writing for this blog beginning Sunday, March 3, 2013.  He will be joining existing Blog Team members Sandra Benward, Ron Setzer and Denise Richmond.  Writing for the blog is on a rotational schedule, a week at a time.

Richard Hanson

Rick is a native of Sacramento but worked in southern California as a computer programmer/database designer/team leader. He retired in 2002 and moved back to Sacramento after spending his first retirement year as a tourist in San Diego. While in southern California, Rick served on the boards of computer clubs, genealogical societies, two condo associations and a chapter of the National Space Society.  He also served several years as editor for the quarterly COMPU.GEN (Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego).

In 1982, Rick started his family history research using a text editor and moved to a Macintosh a couple years later for its publishing capability.  Since then, he's self-published seven family history books.  During the 1990s, Rick started using Reunion genealogy software.  His personal genealogy goal for the first half of this year is to completely reorganize how he tracks and documents sources in Reunion.

In addition to Rick's new new role as Blog Writer, he will continue to contribute to Root Cellar Sacramento Genealogical Society as a helper and occasional presenter for the Society's monthly Workshop and the Reunion Special Interest Group, and a as volunteer at its annual Spring Seminar.

Other local groups benefit from Rick's talents - he's active in the:

• Sacramento German Genealogy Society serving as Secretary and leader of the EasyNetSites admin team
• California GenWeb, having created and currently maintains its website for Sierra County
• Genealogical and Historical Council Sacramento Valley where he's listed in its speaker's directory

William Horn and
Amelia "Bridgett" Keenan

I asked Rick if he had a brickwall ancestor.  Of course!  Meet William Horn, pictured with wife Amelia "Bridget" Keenan.  They married in 1863 in Sierra County, California.  Rick has quite a lot of information about William's activities after he arrived in Sierra County, California on/before 1851 to engage in gold mining.  However, before that only secondary sources say he was born 14 Aug 1929 in Prussia. The "family rumor" is that William jumped ship in an eastern U.S. port in 1846 and later rode to the California gold fields on horseback.

If you have a William Horn and Amelia "Bridget" Keenan in your family tree or just want to leave a welcome message, comment on this post or send it to Rick at rootcellarsgs@gmail.com.

Welcome again, Rick!

Contributed by Rick Hanson
Posted by Denise H. Richmond