Friday, April 11, 2014

Follow Friday - PRINT please.... NO Scribblings

Editor's note: Today's post was written by Sandra Gardner-Benward


Root Cellar Sacramento Genealogical Society has a very active extraction committee. A lot of committed members who come Friday after Friday after Friday for 4 hours at a time extracting books, ledgers, documents and boxes of information from the past.

We have partnered with the Center for Sacramento History. Fortunately we have a great working relationship with them and everyone is so helpful. We have been working with the Center for a number of years and we have completed LOTS of publications. See our list. Our Volunteer Coordinator and Senior Archivist (Reference, Government Records) Patricia J. Johnson. A big thank you to Pat for all her help and support. Every time someone comes in to do some research and they use one of our publications she comes in and lets us know. She says that these people would not have found any of this information if it hadn't been organizes and transcribed. Pat is so appreciative.
        

Check out the Journal Book I am working on and have been working on for about a year - Friday after Friday after Friday, week after week after week and month after month after month ................... it just goes on forever, that is what we seem to say about any new project we start and somehow it finally ends and you begin a new project.

The project I am working on is "Deaths and Internments 1925-1929" all from the Sacramento County. All very interesting, some very sad and some funny and some 'just can't believe it thought'. One thing I wish is that the coroner would learn how to PRINT or at least a legible cursive, but this is not the case.


As you can see, the books in this project are huge. There are a series of three of these books in this series - I have only one of them. As we get into a new project we develop a template with just gathering the information we want. Then if there are multiple members contributing to the same project - all the information will be coming in the same. Much easier for the end result. Some members are using just the paper template and most others are using a computer file template. I prefer the computer since then this information is only written once unlike the hand written one- someone else has to read their handwriting while entering it into the computer. Time consuming and uses volunteers for the same thing.


There are approximately 50 entries on a page with each entry covering both pages. This book has 274 pages. Some sections have blank pages in between letters but a lot of have continuations from other letters........  yes it is a little frightening and a surprise  to end the letter 'A' and find there are 6 or more pages of the letter 'M' following before you reach the letter 'B'.


If you haven't tried extracting/ transcribing where you live, try it, you may find it rewarding. But it will be very helpful for someone else. I don't have any ancestors in California (except one twig in Pasadena) but I do this work because I am sure that there is someone living in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut that are doing the same thing and will give me answers in my family research. Thank you to those wonderful people.

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