BASEBALL -- BLOG -- BURGERS -- BLOODMOON

You know it is a pretty interesting ballgame when the pitcher from your team unloads a grand slam. This happened in last night's game between the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies. Madison Bumgarner (still checking to see if he is related . . .) had already hit a sacrifice long ball -- just short of a home run in his previous at--bat. He luckily came up again this time with the bases loaded, how could that be worrisome for the Rockies:

On the first pitch Madison dumped it into the left-center stands giving the Giants a lead that they managed to hang onto to win. Apparently Madison is known for his long-ball hitting -- in batting practice and he takes abuse for his game time hitting -- but not for awhile now, he is among only a few Giants pitchers to ever have a grand slam. And how did he celebrate -- according to the announcer -- "with  a snot-rocket" . . . I'm pretty sure he is NOT related.

Dates From our Tree

Things are lookin' up -- in terms of the number of wedding anniversaries anyway -- six in the next week:

Check 'em out and get those cards and letters sent . . .

Webinars 

As predicted in the last post there were two webinars this week -- and one of them changed my modus operandi -- in terms of genealogy anyway, and maybe carried over a bit into other facets of daily life.
More about that in a minute . . .

The next two weeks have additional webinars that look valuable as well. Both of the upcoming presenters are top-notch, so I look forward to attending their sessions:

There still is time to sign up for these webinars that are "no-charge" for the live sessions, check out Family Tree Webinars . . .

Now the life-changing session from this week. Both webinars this week were excellent and I received good
information that I can use from both -- but one had some immediate reaction . . .

Recall that the two webinars were -- the first on Wednesday, on 4-Color organizing of genealogy stuff, the second webinar on Friday concerned Estate documents (not just Wills).

This must be the year for me to "take another look-see" at how I have (or have not)  organized my genealogy stuff -- I worked through filing several thousand digital images of screenshots from over the years and I am working on the backlog of photos as well.

Now the webinar on Wednesday is giving me a renewed look at "taking care of" the paper trail that has accumulated in 20 or 30 years . . .

Above on the left is what "some" of my paper looks like both in the banker's boxes and in drawer files. On the right is the start of the system that I have worked on to hopefully correct the unwieldy paper. It is the brainchild of Mary Hill who some 18 years ago developed the four-color system and has perfected it and presented it on Wednesday.

The system starts with the pedigree (mine e.g.) of five generations up to my gr gr grandparents. It has been interesting to do the basic start-up which will become the basis for filing all paper documents in the future and from the banker's boxes and other files . . .

After Gail and I ran over to Office Depot and I started physically setting up the system, step-by-step, I thought "how hard could this be" . . . it did take me two days to set up the basic 4 colors as seen above on the right. The nice part is that I do actually feel that it makes sense and that it will allow me to grow into filling up more files -- but with the capability to find the things that I have filed fairly quick.

I am taking it slowly so that I "do it right" and so that it works. I'll give updates from time to time, starting right now:

One of the first impacts was that in following the steps, one step called for making a file for each family that I found on my 5-generation pedigree chart -- and as I got farther out on the pedigree chart, the less information that I had on some families.

AND, another factor that hit me was Patonymics -- and it is a subject that I have pretty much ignored in the past, but now feel that I need to address. Since I have Scandinavian ancestors Swedish and Norwegian, some of the surnames change with each generation . . .

For the Norwegians, a son would take his father's first name and add "--sen" to it and that would be his surname. A Norwegian daughter would take her father's first name and add "--datter" to it to form the surname. But that was not always consistent and when coming "across the pond" things frequently changed as well.

And the same sort of system is found with the Swedish folks in the tree, only mostly using "--son" for the males.

I now have to figure out what is what with the Scandinavian naming convention as it relates to our folks. It is a huge time-consuming venture, but I'd like to know the correct way and I am hoping the new "system" will be a great aid. All in all, thanks to Mary Hill and all her work,  related to this system.

And Now -- More About the Giants  Blood Moons

Apparently we are in store for an eclipse of the moon appearing on this coming Tuesday, April 15th -- which of course has other significance as well (tax related).

Not only are we scheduled to have one such "blood moon" but four in total, each coming about six months after the other, called a Tetrad:

Above you can see the dates of the four eclipses through 2015. It is just coincidence that the blood moon has Giants colors . . . check out www.space.com for more information.

So that was a peek into our week. It is Saturday and it will be burgers tonight. See you all "in a few".