A Very Warm Valentine Day Greeting

The sun is working overtime this week in Northern California. The days are warm and sunny -- it does not do much for the drought, but it is very pleasant.

This week has been filled with sessions -- sessions from the world's largest genealogy event held in Salt Lake City -- ROOTSTECH:

As I have mentioned before -- I would love to attend "rootstech" but during the last three days I have done the next best thing by watching live streaming sessions of selected sessions.

Earlier in the week I also attended a Family Tree Webinar on "Zigzagging Through German Church Records" which as usual I was able to glean many worthwhile research points.

But I have to say that the streaming sessions from Rootstech have been super -- and I just finished the last one a few minutes ago:

Above you can get some of the flavor of the sessions. There were several "keynote" speakers and several classroom type presentations. Without a doubt, for me, the very best session was the keynote address from Donny Osmond.

Donny Osmond presented a wonderful "story", one that I will remember for a long time. I hope that they have recordings available of it because I would like to view it again. He is so very accomplished and able to make a remarkable recollection of events from his personal life as well as translate that to be meaningful to others.

Particularly when he spoke about the early days of his father and mother's marriage and the start of their family you could feel the emotion and admiration for family in his words and presence.

Some Researching Too

I actually did achieve some success in my researching as well this week. With the collaboration of another cousin (you know who you are . . .) we have pretty much determined one more child of my 3rd Great Grandfather -- John Hiles Jr.

I have read that between his two wives that he had 16 children, three with Nancy Crosby and I now have 12 to list with Charity Reed. The last one is Hannah Hiles. that leaves one more to identify.

On the left above you can see the list of children from John & Charity, Each one of the kids would be either a 3rd Great Aunt or a 3rd Great Uncle. So it is nice to see that with the addition of Hannah and her marriage to John (James) Perrigo the numerous newly identified 1st cousins and 2nd cousins so far.

We'll keep our fingers crossed that we can find the one more Great Aunt of Uncle and the cousins from that person as well.

It truly is "one more piece of the puzzle" that keeps us enthused and moving on.

Speaking of Puzzles

Genealogy is very much like working on a jigsaw puzzle. And of course as we have mentioned many times before -- Gail works jigsaw puzzles regularly:

Over to the right you can see the Valentine Puzzle that she got a couple of weeks ago. My thinking was that it would carry her into the week of Valentine's Day . . . I would be wrong.

Gail put in a lot of effort and finished the very complicated border to complete the heart-shaped valentine early last week . . .

That meant that she could enjoy viewing her work, but precluded her from the puzzle activity.

The solution was simply to pull out another puzzle and work on that as well.

So that is just what she did:

The American Express Train is another Liberty Wooden Puzzle that has a lot of appeal.

It also generated a drive in Gail to finish it as soon as she could -- so that means not only did she complete the Valentine's puzzle, she finished the Train puzzle as well.

I can attest that these are "not that easy" to do. But they are addictive. Kind of like the genealogy puzzles for me.

I just wish that there was some sort of sense of completion every once in a while in genealogy like in the completion of wooden jigsaw puzzles.


Lastly

Gail has been talking about putting in a
garden. So today, in between Rootstech
sessions (for me) and her needle pointing,
she did.

Started a garden in the dining room. Indoor
herb growing and later can be flowers.

There are seven types of seeds starting to germinate that will provide us with some
herbs in a few weeks -- we hope.

More to follow on the progress of her gardening as the weeks go by.

That was a part of our week. Have a great Valentine's Day and we'll see you all in a few!