Saturday Challenge- Genealogy Presents

The Saturday Fun Challenge from Randy Seaver's GeneaMusings:

1)    What gift that you received for Christmas is your favorite for genealogy purposes? Book, magazine, hardware, software, website subscription, research time, DNA test - what was it, and how will it affect your genealogy research?

Well, I didn’t really receive anything for Christmas that pertains to genealogy. In part, that is because I don’t really exchange presents with anyone except my husband and we do just a few little things. However I did receive a few things through the Christmas season that are wonderful genealogical items!

First, my husband and I figured out what dates we will be taking a trip in the spring. This trip is to NERGC (New England Regional Genealogical Conference) in Springfield, Massachusetts. Our registrations are in for the conference and we have our hotel room booked. I think that might count as a present? I’m excited to see everybody in New England that week and to learn a few new things as well. I have many ancestors in New England and enjoy researching that area, so there will be various classes related to specific places that I will be aiming to get to. Additionally, there is a Writing Track at the conference that I expect to take full advantage of.

There are a couple books that I got on Christmas Eve that might be considered genealogy as well. Both of them weren’t actual presents, but items that were in my late mother’s house.

The first is something that she has kept careful care of since 1970 when her mother died. It is a Bible that my Grandma owned and that was presented to her in her Sunday School class in the Church of Ireland. This Bible, originally received by Alice V. Jennings Wooster in 1905 won’t help my genealogy. I have already looked through it carefully to extract any data it might contain of a genealogical nature years ago. However, it is a tangible item of the only grandmother I was lucky enough to know.

The second book is a cookbook from 1950. The Levanna Community Church in southern Cayuga County, New York compiled it. This is a typical church or community cookbook that was compiled by the members of that group and sold presumably as a fundraiser. I noted that it was produced by a mimeograph machine in the Sherwood High School, which has long since been condensed into the bigger, consolidated school district of Southern Cayuga Central Schools. Flipping through the pages, many of the names are familiar to me. A few of them belong to people that are various  degrees of cousins of mine. Again, this book will do nothing to expand my genealogy research. However, the recipes are representative of that area in that time period. An area very near (a few miles of) where my direct ancestors lived; written by contemporaries of them, that were relatives, friends, neighbors or all of the above. Are these not the recipes my grandmother and mother would have been cooking with or very close to them? I do already have many of my mother’s recipes, but they are mostly of a later time period. These are, of course, from before there were so many convenience foods available. They are what those recipes of hers evolved from. It is nice to look through and maybe, make a few of the ones that most appeal to us.