Greeting the New Year

2010 is here and I am back at home after a month away.  I was visiting my daughter and famiy in Arizona for three weeks, south of Tucson, and my nephews in Las Vegas for a week.  Christmas and New Year's passed and shortly after I returned to Honolulu the Haiti Earthquake happened.  The tradgedy sparked a inquiry from Operation Smile to me to see if I could rush to Haiti to work on the USNS Hospital Ship Comfort.  I was asked because I'm an operating room nurse that has recently worked on a surgical mission on the Comfort (offshore Nicaragua last July).  As it turned out the plans for Operation Smile shifted gears from doing life saving surgeries on the ship, to sending a small team in to do surgeries on land.  Perhaps more assistance will be needed down the line.  I've been riveted to the news programs about the situation in Haiti, and now with rescue and recovery teams leaving, I hope that the survivors will treated and sustained.

As far as genealogy goes, I have begun getting clients through Ancestry.com for conducting research.  But of real enjoyment was talking to a cousin on my Joshua Wallace side and catching up with the family.  It is so nice to have a not too distant cousin who enjoys doing genealogy and is interested in sharing information.   I have Family Tree Maker and was going to print out an Outline Descendant Tree for her, but since I haven't used the 2010 version much, I had to "re-find" where this version has hidden that chart (it's under "Relationship Charts" on the Publish Tab).  Then I figured I'd print off a few "Individual Reports", but discovered that these reports have headers that take up a lot of space, and I would have to use too many pages to print them out.  So I copied the Person's Notes and pasted them to a Word document which seemed to be able to condense the information into far fewer pages than if I'd used Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2010.  I feel like I am missing many of the FTM 2010 options, and I've signed on to a blog or two about using FTM 2010.  Now I need time to get back genealogy!

In the meantime I have been busy getting quartzite natural stone squares laid in my small patio area, and also tracking down a mouse (a big one) that seems to like the powdered dehydration salts in foil packets that I brought back from Bangkok when I left the hospital there last May.

I'm looking forward to the visit of my Welsh "Rees" family cousins, Jan and Russ, coming this March and am really happy that I'll be able to show them around Hawaii.  I originally met this line of my Rees-Pearce family through the internet about ten years ago and since then we've had visits back and forth.  Several of the family are interested in the family history and of our common ancestors, Elias & Jennet Rees, of Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, Wales. 

Coming up, I hope to catch up with some of the genealogy blogs I subscribe to.  I feel kind of cut off from the genealogy world when I don't read them.    Thanks to all that made comments on my Pearce Genealogy Photo Book.  I have plans to make other similar books.