Image courtesy Clipartix.com General Meeting Saturday, September 19 (Virtual) 9:30 am Social time; 10 am General Membership Meeting .    Click or paste the link to join:     https://meet.google.com/qeq-hytd-jii?hs=122&authuser=0 or call: (‪US‬) ‪+1 510-939-0384‬ PIN: ‪268 689 236#‬     E lection of officers: Valorie Zimmerman has been nominated for the office of Vice President and agreed to serve if elected. Linda Blais has been nominated for the office of Secretary and agreed to serve if elected.  There will be an opportunity for additional nominations at the meeting.  Should there be additional candidates, members will be instructed how to vote by email during the meeting. Our Speaker: Mary Kircher Roddy     presents   Trails West: Crossing the Continent, 1840-1869 .   Image courtesy Clipartlook.com   Welcome New Members; Welcome New Faces! If you've participated in special interest and chat groups this ...

Who Does Your DNA Think You Are? Save the Date! And get involved with the preparations! We've got a tremendous seminar coming up next June and the Seminar Committee members, headed by Winona Laird, are already working hard to make this a success.  Valorie Zimmerman is in charge of publicity.  Last May we mailed "Save the Date" postcards to nearly 100 genealogy societies, historical societies and other organizations. Linda Blais is in charge of the Silent Auction and Raffle.  She has a list of items she plans to put in baskets and bundles for either the auction or raffle.  You may have one of the items you would be happy to donate or procure.  Linda would love to hear from you. The flyer above is available on our website  skcgs.org   Please download it, print a few copies to hand out or email it to friends.    The seminar is eight months away but it will go quickly.   Between now and next June there will ...

By Linda Blais At our June meeting, Mary Kathryn Kozy gave us some practical tips for preparing to take a genealogy research trip.  Listening to Mary brought back memories of the last research trip I took to North Carolina and Tennessee with my cousin who acted as my research assistant. It also brought up some "aha" or "oops" moments on a couple of things that didn't go quite as planned, even though I had spent months preparing my itinerary. Here are some basics about the trip. My goal was to visit as many historical sites, libraries, museums, courthouses and archives as I could in 10 days that were relevant to the life of Sarah Barton Murphy, who lived in North Carolina as a child between 1753 and 1760 and in Tennessee as an adult between 1781 and 1802.  She is not my ancestor, but I am in the process of writing a biography about her. Her claim to fame is that she founded the first Sunday school west of the Mississippi in 1805. The research I do for an anc...

By Linda Blais I first learned about the Fiske Genealogical Library in June of 2017 when doing research for a biography that I writing about the founder of the first Sunday school west of the Mississippi. WorldCat has been one of my favorite places to go to find books that cover my research topic and to see if they are in a local library. While searching for books dealing with Missouri, I discovered that the only library locally that had the book I needed was the Arthur Fiske Genealogical Library in Seattle. Since this was a new library to me, checking out this repository became a fun task. Of course, I needed to know where it was. Two immediate places to find more information came to mind: Google Maps and the Internet. Yeah! Fiske had a website: https://fiskelibrary.org . Their "Library Information" page gave me the address and information that the Library was housed in Washington Pioneer Hall. Google Maps showed me that the building was right on Lake Washington. Ho...