Day 2 of our Research Trip October 27th

Day 2 October 27th
This was the first real day of research at the Family History Library (FHL) in Salt Lake City.
The opening time was 8:00 a.m., however, the group waited until 8 to leave the hotel so we would miss the crowd waiting at the door (more on this later). The Palatine group had an orientation session scheduled. After the session, I did some research by finding the call number for Dutchess County, New York and then going to level 3 in the Library which contains US/Canada Books. I spent the next hour there browsing Dutchess County books until it was time for the first genealogy course at 10:00 a.m. This week the FHL was offering courses on German genealogy the first one being “Determining Place of Origin of Immigrant Ancestors in Germany.” Before this however, I had scheduled an afternoon Consultation with the International desk on level 2 US/Canada Microfilms to help me find my German Schultz family in the German records.

Around noon we took time out to walk across Temple Square to the Church office building to get a very tasty lunch at a very reasonable price in their cafeteria. The weather this day and throughout the week was fantastic with daytime temperatures around 70 F. The break also allowed us to stretch our legs and get the blood circulating again after sitting and reading books and microfilms all morning.

The German Consultation (free by the way) was fantastic. After explaining my problem to the consultant, and providing a town name in Germany, she looked up the parish name for the town, pulled out the appropriate microfilm and took about two minutes to find my ancestor and his siblings in the German parish records, which were written in script. We also found the marriage of his parents.

So now I had the connection between Germany and Canada and knew their full names and dates. Later I was able to look on my own and find a bit more information. Later in the week I had the appropriate records translated into English by another person with our Palatine group.
So, not having looked at my list of books and microfilms that I wanted to look at, I now had a major breakthrough in one of my family lines. This was very exciting!

The FHL library closed at 5:00 p.m. on Monday. So this gave us time to recover in the evening, although the Palatine group had scheduled a group supper which we attended.

A number of the people in the group had never visited the FHL in Salt Lake City before, and in spite of the orientations session we all felt overwhelmed at first. We soon got over that!
Edward