Two Genealogy Journals Finished and Sent to Members

I'm a little behind on announcing that the latest issues of ZichronNote and The Baobab Tree have been finished and distributed to members of the respective genealogical societies.  As usual, I think I found a good mix of topics for the journals, and I learned something from each article.

In the May 2015 issue of ZichronNote, two articles, by John Althouse and Jeff Lewy, address the problems and pitfalls of spelling as it relates to finding our relatives in indexed records.  Not only should we take into account the education levels, languages, and writing skills of both the people reporting the information and those recording that information, the talents of whoever creates the indices we use in our searches have a huge effect on our possibilities of success.  Daria Valkenburg wrote about displaced persons' camps in Europe after the end of World War II.  SFBAJGS member Rebecca Elliot contributed an article about how she discovered and met her half-brother; until recently, she had not even been sure he was still alive.  Krzysztof Bielawski, the man behind the Kirkuty Polish cemetery Web site, gave us a little bit of history on how the site came to be.  And I (the person who hates to write) was moved to write about my encounter with Leonard Nimoy (z''l) after his recent passing.

The Spring 2015 issue of The Baobab Tree has a fantastic lead story:  AAGSNC board member Nicka Smith discovered that her grandparents knew Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, during the short period the Kings lived in Chicago.  Following that is an excellent resource article from Eric Johnson on how to look for black soldiers in early U.S. Army records.  Angela Williams Brown, who has just recently started family history research, talks about some newbie lessons she has already learned.  Betsy Monroe enlightened us as to early black settlements in the Capay Valley area of California.  And Jackie Chauhan, the AAGSNC historian, wrote about the 10th anniversary of the Sacramento African American Family History Seminar, which was held this past March.

All you need to do to receive these journals when they are published is to be a member of the respective societies.  So if these articles sound interesting to you, visit the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society (for ZichronNote) and the African American Genealogical Society of Northern California (for The Baobab Tree) to join and you can be reading them soon.

The other way to receive the journals is to be a contributing author.  I could be promoting your article here!  Have you had a breakthrough in your family history, solved a family mystery through painstaking research, discovered a better way to use resource materials, or walked where your ancestors walked as part of a heritage trip?  Do you have an interesting story about your family history in the San Francisco area?  We would love to read about it in one of the journals.  Submission guidelines for The Baobab Tree, including deadlines, are available online, or you can send me a message regarding either journal, and we can talk about it!