June 3, 2007

June is here and I am still working on figuring out which cord or cable goes with which electronic gadget. I've finally finished the first cut on the first three hours of the Mongolian adventure, and downloaded the 4th hour of videotape onto the hard drive, and backed it up to my external hard drive. I will have to begin editing that, then download hours 5 and 6 to finish with the video from Mongolia. The Adventurers' Club meeting was held at the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki and the subject was about some of the cities of Europe. The presenters' photography was outstanding and the the food great. I'm editing my Mongolia tapes to do my own presentation in Feb 2008 for the Adventurers' Club.

I've spent some time getting involved with FamilyHistoryLiveOnline.com and have volunteered to give online genealogy classes and genealogy support. I've also connected up online with familyoralhistory.us which has a blog of Family Oral History Using Digital Tools. Susan Kitchens, the host, had a "scanfest" where we could connect using a download of "Gizmo" service. If what I'm saying doesn't make a lot of sense to the reader, well, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me sometimes, either.

Today I was searching on Ancestry.com for Howard Blanding (picture on left) my "3rd cousin once removed" on my Blanding side, of Erie County, NY, and lately living in Florida. He has given me a lot of information about his line in New York, we have a common ancestor in Ebenezer Blanding II, whose father was in the US Revolution. I found his Carey family in all the census back to 1850 and it was quite a challenge with different spellings and different transcribers' interpretations of the name they saw. I didn't find the link back to Ireland for the Carey's, but at least I may have shed a little bit of new light on the Careys. Picture of Howard's grandfather on right - Samuel Love Carey.

Yesterday I drove up to Waipahu, about 45 minutes away, and participated in the Genealogy Workshop at Hawaii's Plantation Village. The village is a wonderful collection of authentic homes and other buildings from the collection of various cultures that lived on the sugar plantations. This day was a chance for different cultures to get help with genealogy: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Okinawan, Portuguese and our table from the Honolulu County Genealogy Society. It was a fun event and we helped quite a few people. One Japanese-American woman, (and her mother -- both born in Hawaii), didn't know that her mother, was born on the island of Kauai, until we had her fill out a pedigree chart! I think she got the message that she should find out about her 92 yr old mother's life before it is too late.

I've got one month left at home before I fly out to Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Iowa. I bet I won't feel very prepared for the trip by the time comes to leave.