Catch-up time

So much happening. So little time to write.

I taught three classes at the Institute of Genealogy this week. They were well received. Or so it appeared to me.

A possible distant cousin spoke with me after class yesterday. His wife shares my last name. He told me a familiar story of the original clan grandfather in old New York. His wife can't prove her connection to that grandfather, but highly suspects the connection. I can't prove (family has proven and dispoven the connection-I might have a go at re-proving it soon) our connection with that possible ancestor, either. The student, a former librarian from Oregon, was receptive to the idea of a family organization whose goal is to sort out that whole ancestral mess. More organizational work that I need to do...

Meanwhile, I continue to try to add to the total number of members that I've identified as part of the family. That total is a little over 29,000 at this point. Today I chipped away at the effort by doing a little census research. That was augmented this afternoon when I found a new two-CD set of scanned family information about the Callisters. I copied all of the documents to go through at home.

It appears that the documents were created in about 1964-5. I have most of the information about that corner of the family already, so I have little faith that I'll find many new names to add to the file. On the up side, it appears that there are a lot of dates and places included in the documents that I can use to build the database. Many of the documents include brief autobiographies, physical descriptions and occupational listings. Most of the documents also contain 40 year old addresses. Anyway, it'll be fun to go through the stuff.