It's A Rare Day!

I am posting a picture of me because at all events, I seem to be the one taking the pictures.  This time I am at work at the reference desk of the Family History Library and at the receiving end of the camera.    Here I am with my lovely FamilySearch shirt on that we were required to wear for the NGS conference back in April of 2010.

Christmas Luncheon

Here we are on the way to the Church Office Building.  We stopped for a Photo-op and we asked a passer-by to take a pic of the four of us.  We are from left to right, Gerda Bals, Sylvie Pysnak, Sonja, and Barbara Bell.  We are standing next to the Tabernacle and in front of the big nativity.  We were anxiously awaiting our 15 meatballs and shrimp luncheon, but were disapointed in not getting them this year...:( Oh well, so we had ham and chicken nuggets or something like that.  It was OK, but not as good as years past.  We have always enjoyed our luncheons and kind of joke about some of our past ones where Heidi sat on the food which was on a chair, we all spill on each other and get all messy and etc. etc.  This year, no fatalities.  But afterwards we all had to go to Human Resources to do some paperwork and of course, for the second time, the program was not working.  However, somehow after about 1 hour of trying, they got it up and going again.  Since it took so long, we called Ruth, our boss, and I said, that we had all decided to do a little shopping after the luncheon since it was such a nice day.  We would be back later when we were done.  Ruth said we were all fired.  So we gave the phone to Annette, the human resource person, who said to Ruth, she was re-hiring all of us.  It was kind of funny, helped to relieve a little stress to have a good laugh once in a while.



Memories From Long Ago or It's a Small, Small World

Today was our employee and missionary luncheon at the Church Office Bldg.  We have a devotional speaker who is usually one of the church authorities, as was the case today.  Our International floor was sitting together on one table.  On my table was our missionary Hans Arndt.  I told the others about a little story from long ago that Elder Arndt had told me and my coworkers told me, "You need to put that on your blog for safe keeping".  And so here I am doing that.
Here is the little story.  My dad, Heinz Hoeke grew up in Freiberg, Sachsen and shortly after the war worked at a printshop there.  About that time Hans Arndt's family in Berlin sent him to live with friends in Freiberg.  He stayed right across the street from my dad and in fact at the relatives of my dad's, the Henkels.  Hans told me one day that my father's mother asked him to take a warm lunch to my dad at his place of work.  Now after all these years he came to work as a missionary at the Library and got to know me and reacquainted himself with my dad who also comes to the Library to do private research for clients.  It is a really small world and you never know when you will run into people that you knew from so long ago...I think it is really cool!

Community Trees Online

Today we talked about a project called community trees. Just what I want for my Jaryzsow Reconstruction Project. I have been looking for some way to put this online. Maybe this will help. I also discovered, quite by accident, a man in a French-Polish genealogy forum that was looking for records of the Kalisch family in Nogowschuetze. What a strange surprise. I am really excited about this. I posted a reply and hope you will see it and respond to me. I have many Kalisch in my reconstruction project. And only one of the female name that he had which was Kondziela. It fact, he was searching for an Agnes and that is the only Kondziela that I have found.

www.forums.familysearch.org

Have a genealogy question?  Here is a place to post your question and have members of the genealogical community answer them.  Give it a try and see if it works for you.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Work Assignment 8

Today's work blog assignment was to check out Google Docs.  I wasn't really aware of this too much, although a friend mentioned it to me but here you can upload documents to work on, save, send or whatever.  I think it is kind of a cool thing.  The idea is that at some point in time, programs such as Microsoft Word, etc will be eventually replaced by this.  I can see the possibilities.  I like how it works and in the case of my computer crash, you would know the important things are there.  However, like in Picasa web albums, after a certain amount of space is used you would need to buy more room to store.  So depending on the costs, that could be a problem.

By the way, my computer wasn't a "true" crash, which is great news for me, but rather my video driver died and so that is why I could see absolutely nothing.I now have it back and happy that no data was lost.

Another part of Assignment 8 was to go to YouTube and find  a Family History video.  I found one of an interview of Thomas McEntee, the so called "Father" of Family History blogging.  He spoke of concerns others had regarding copywrite issues and privacy concerns.

Finished Assignments 1-7

So I have professional development today as I have no counter shift for some reason.  Well, I have finished the first 7 assignments, including adding to the FamilySearch Wiki.  I have done that in the past and won't now because I am working on some things off-line for Switzerland that I haven't finished yet.  I will upload them when they are to the point that I can.\

Things Don't Always Work As They Should

I tried to add a "widgit" to my blog, but the template always tells me that the URL contains illegal characters.  Of course.  Such is life and learning.

Find a Grave

So another assignment is to log in to Find a Grave and find some famous people.  I found Bob Hope's entry.  http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=7716821 There was no picture of his stone that I could see, but a story about him and a picture while he was still young.  I chose him because I had an interesting experience with Bob Hope when I was about 18-19 years old.  At that time I was a BYU student and had flown home to California, stand-by style and got bumped in Las Vegas.  I was a little distraught because it didn't look like there was another seat available till the following day.  So the man at the counter said to me that he had an idea if I would wait a minute while he checked the matter out.  So I did.  While I waited, I saw him go up to a man and he asked if I could fly on his private flight to Palm Springs.  The man looked at me and it was Bob Hope.  I about fainted... Bob Hope said I could go.  So I got on this very small plane and away we went.  When I got to the airport in Palm Springs, which was still small back in those days, my dad was late picking me up due to a flat tire.  I waited in the front and was all alone when Bob Hope came up to me, swinging a golf club.  He began speaking to me and I have to admit that I can't remember a word of that conversation, except that I was just amazed.  Finally a limo came for him and after that sometime later, finally my dad showed up.  Too late to meet Bob Hope though.  Anyway, that was what came to mind as I was working on this assignment.

Blog Assignment

OK, so we are requested to blog after each step in the current training process we are working on. I am putting a link to my German pictures here: http://picasaweb.google.com/sonjaandfamily/Germany2009#  It was a great experience last August, taking both my daughter and my grandson to Germany. We included some "play" and some work time. Sometimes those two things were in a combination and therefore Tyson didn't even realize that he was learning new things. Learning is certainly more fun when you can play rather than just work...work...work!