PC Community Main Meeting
7:30 - 10 pm Friday November 4, 2011
Calvary Baptist Church 28924 Ruus Road, Hayward California
The meeting was called to order at 7:37 p.m. by President Chuck Horner. He noted that PCC needs to do some outreach and tell people about the user group. He distributed business cards that members can hand out to share information. The Clubhouse has met with Alameda County Recycling and will have more information after another meeting in the middle of November. He encouraged everyone to buy a ticket for the raffle prize.
SIG Announcements:
The Windows 7 SIG will meet at Bud Gallagher’s at 1 p.m. on the 12th, the customary second Saturday. The plan is for Verne Perry to present accessing Windows through a Linux boot disc.
Elections for the PCC Board of Directors will be held during the December Main Meeting.
Presentations:
Bud Gallagher demonstrated iTwin, which works like a remote desktop. One part of the USB is installed on his computer at home. He installed the other end of the iTwin USB on Diane’s computer—which had never seen it before. He then logged on to his home computer.
Question about transferring from Eudora to Thunderbird. Eudora has not been updated since 2002. Bud used a program called Aid for Mail to convert the Eurora files. Question about how to write a letter, scan it, and attach to an email.
Bill and Diane George presented a geneaology overview. Start by creating a sheet with what you know about your grandparents Names, birth and death dates. Whenever you visit a relative, bring a camera and a scanner and get as much information about family history. Keep track of everything, not only what you have but also where you got it. Census records records go back to 1790 and are available through 1930. Because of handwriting errors in older documents, there may be errors in names. Diane warned her listeners to examine all data carefully. Diane will post the PowerPoint with all the references on the website. The more significant include:
The Latter Day Saints have many geneaology resources at many locations around the country. The website at Http:// familysearch.org also has many support resources.
Ancestry has a variety of levels of access. It is the largest paid database and has the widest range of resources and indexes worldwide.
FindAGrave has volunteers who take pictures of tombstones and upload information about tombstones.
Another volunteer resource is http://www.usgenweb.org. Each state and most US counties have web pages. They are looking for more volunteers. This is one reason that knowing which county you’re looking for is important.
Genealogy Trails is also a volunteer site organized by state.
Googlebooks indexes books so that you might find a reference to a historical ancestor.
Alameda County Library has an excellent set of online resources and most library locations have a subscription to ancestry.com.
Cyndi's List is a famous site with links to many sites. It is well organized so that it is easy to clilck through and find some resources.
There are a number of ways for getting information onto a computer. Family Tree Maker and Legacy get to reviews for the PC world. Family Tree Maker can be integrated into Ancestry.com. Reunion runs natively on a Mac. Wikipedia has a comparison of genealogy software packages.
There are also sites where one can post family tree information for others to see. Some companies also offer web-based storage. There are other companies that will print up charts. A book is another kind of output that can be created from the data.
After the break Chuck distributed printed descriptions of the PCC Election procedures. The following people were nominated:
Andrew Tews
Chuck Horner
Michael Wong
Don Odle
Nominations will remain open until voting at the December main meeting.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:12 p.m.
The next meeting will take place at the same location on December 2, 2011.
Respectfully submitted,
Bayle Emlein, Secretary
