051917

Last weekend Jon/Angelé with their kids came down to visit us for a couple of days.  Also, it was a mini vacation for their family.  It was very nice to see them.

Our families together.  Arlene, Angelé with Vyvian, Jon with Feonyx and me in the back.  On the temple grounds in St George.

 

Strolling the grounds, heading over to the ROC so we could give them a tour of our work area.

 

The family together

 

On the East steps of the temple

 

Such a beautiful night on the temple grounds...really liking St George

So, back to the ROC for our work and stuff that we have been doing.  We have a visit to Manti for the pageant up there in late June and a Seger Family Reunion in mid-July.  That should be about the end of our planned activities for the next few months, unless, of course, something interesting comes up....

051517

We managed to get out of Camino before 8 AM and headed East.  But, rather than heading south towards Bakersfield and over to Las Vegas, we decided to go Highway 50 over through Nevada and down to St George.  Interestingly enough, we took the "Extra Terrestrial Highway". I always thought highway 50 was out of the way and kind of lonely but this highway is far more deserted than 50 ever thought to be.  But, it was kind of interesting.

Joshua Trees along the road

 

Flat road in the middle of nowhere.  If you look really far down the road, it goes way up the hill back there.  We were treated to these views all day long.  

Certainly in the middle of nowhere.

  

 

Proof that we were there...

051417

The Mother's Day celebration also had us celebrating Garret's birthday.  So, you know how that goes.

Mother's Day 2017.  We all got together and had ribs for dinner.  Since we had to leave the next day to head back to St. George, it seemed like a great day to talk to everyone and just relax after the wedding/other activities.

The kidlets table.  Cousins passing time together.

 

Ribs, brats, tri-tip, and lots of other stuff.  Some good eating going on there.

 

Jeff and Kate's friends came up and spent the day with us.  Geeks are so much fun.

  The next day we took off for St George again.  Back to our little apartment and our mission.  It was a nice break for a few days.

051317

It's been a busy last couple of weeks so I haven't had much of a chance to post anything.  But, I'll try to catch things up a bit.  On May 11th we headed to California to attend Jeffrey and Kate Russell's wedding on the 14th.  It was held in Lincoln, Ca at the Catta Verdera Country Club.

The practice the night before

Jeff and Kate with Nathan, Jeff's brother, who will be officiating at the real wedding the following day.

 

After the rehearsal the wedding party retired to Sheldon and Leza Turner's for pulled pork sandwiches, etc. for an evening feast provided by Nathan.  Here are some of Kate and Jeff's "geek/nerd" friends they've played with online.  Really nice people. 

 

...another table of their friends.

 

On the morning of the wedding, Michael and Henry were decked out and looked so very handsome.  

 

Getting ready for the main event.

 

Must be the right place

 

Sophie, the flower girl is ready for the whole thing to get rolling, I'm thinking.

 

The young ladies are all ready...

 

The young men are all in order and right in front of me so I can't take a picture...but, here comes the bride in all of her splendor...

 

Let it all begin...

 

A few minutes later and all of the magic words are exchanged...and the kissing begins...

 

Introducing Mr. and Mrs. Seger...

 

The exit....then everyone leaves...a million family photos to follow...sigh....seems like I just did this in Salt Lake a couple of weeks ago...

 

The wedding party

 

Besties...Jeff is wondering if this is ever going to be over with....

 

Cousin Darrell and his wife Brenda was there representing the Staley family (my brother).  We got to have a nice long talk.  His son, Darrell S Staley, the 4th was supposed to come but had a sporting event he had to be at and couldn't come.  However, see the next picture.

 

Kate's Mom tried so very hard to put the right people together at the right tables and get everything so perfect.  she was so very concerned about the place settings.  Jeff told me they had Cousin Darrell sitting at my table with me and that was perfectly fine, because she didn't know who else to put them with.  However, what she didn't know was how appropriate this was.  You see, Darrell Staley Jr was my brother, who passed away a year ago last November.  Cousin Darrell, the one attending in the picture above, is Darrell Staley the 3rd and his son is the 4th.  there is no way she could have known that so seeing this on the table helped us to remember that my brother and Darrell's Dad was there in spirit and enjoying their wedding. 

 

...and the high chair at that particular place setting made things even more of a smile fest.  My brother probably wouldn't have gotten quite as much of a laugh out of it but we sure did.  We did enjoy the tender feelings we had thinking about my brother and Darrell's Dad for a few minutes.

 

It was a lovely affair

 

The happy couple

 

Cutting the cake.  Zoom in on those cake toppers.  It was a geek wedding, for sure.

 

The wedding dance...

   A few days later they were off to Hawaii for their honeymoon...no, we didn't go along...  Jeff also took a promotion and has recently moved to Cupertino.  so, they will be having som pretty big changes in their new married life.  Congrats, you two!

050617

While talking to someone the other day, I thought it might be interesting for you to know some of the stuff we actually do at the ROC.

We process records for patrons to look up their families names for inclusion in their family histories.  Well, basically, anyway.  Last week I was working on a couple of different projects.  One was to work with batching Revolutionary War records of soldiers.  these are not the actual records but are cards that were done by indexers that took the information from records and put them on file cards back some years ago.  I am looking at the cards and making sure there is information of use to patrons and removing a few files that are really of no value to patrons.

This is the upper portion of the card that has useful information.  I "pass" this card.

  

This is a card that really has no useful information.  It just tells another spelling of the name.  There's no pertinent information that a genealogist could use for family history.  The instruction for this particular project specifically ask that these cards be deleted or removed from the files.  

 

Once I find a file card that looks like the one above, I mark it with the big red circle and cross and it is eliminated from the batch so that only useful information is available for patrons to look at.  That way they don't waste valuable time look at cards with no useful info.  Now for some scope, I batch these cards up at around 10 cards per batch.  In one of the batches I had 717 batches of 10 cards per batch.  I've gotten pretty good at seeing the little writing that makes up the cards I need to delete so I can do one of these card batches in about an hour or so.  Takes me that long to do one of the batches and get it done.  Then someone comes along, checks my batch, and sends it off to be reviewed for accuracy and off for the the family looking for this pertinent info on their ancestor.  Indexers pull info from cards that we've batched for them to index.  See where we play the game at?

 

We also do Publication Review.  That is checking "stuff" that has been batched, then indexed, checked and is now ready for release to patrons for their use.  These are file cards that have been found to have errors in them and are going to be trashed or whatever.  I am just looking over them to make sure they can be moved along.  I need to look them over and make sure they are OK to be moved along to their final destination.  We have all kinds of things to review before they are sent off to patrons.  Duplicates, extra copies, empty copies, all kinds of different issues.  Never a dull moment.  We are usually pretty fried by the end of the week.

In addition we do indexing, zoning of newspapers for articles on deaths, births and marriage related articles (actually kind of fun as the newspapers run from the late 1800s to the late 1980s), and lots of other items to be reviewed and send on.  More to follow on another day.