Berczy Bunch

Back on the 14th of August, I talked about the Markham Berczy Settlers Association web page and the search Rollyo I had created, but I didn't explain the purpose of this group.

It is an association comprised primarily of descendants & spouses of the original settlers to Markham Township, Ontario who came from Germany to Markham in 1794 via the USA. The group promotes research about the group as a whole and the individual families. In 1993, I made the discovery that I was a descendant of one of these early settlers. Johan Stoeber (changed to Stiver)- his daughter Anna married Josiah Hemingway. Then his daughter Hannah married David Johnston and goes on from there.

http://www.bmts.com/~jiles

I knew from a handwritten chart (my mother's handwriting with information from her mother) that Hannah Hemingway and David Johnston were my ancestors and they lived in the Markham Township area. It was through reading the history of Markham that I had purchased at an Ontario Genealogical Society seminar in Toronto that I made the discovery. See my LibraryThing holdings to see books about Markham Township. http://www.librarything.com/catalog/researchergal

In 1994, the newly formed Markham Berczy Settlers Association had a large reunion of descendants of the early families. What a day! Since then, I have been an active member of the organization serving on the Board of Directors. I act as webmaster of the web site and this week updated the newsletter index. It is now on 10 pages. The annoucement of the upcoming meeting is also posted. Robert M. MacIntosh, author of Earliest Toronto will speak.

It is always fun to get together with other members of the group, especially the 5th cousins! This group is a combination genealogy and historical association. It is through this orgnization, I became really interested in combining the study of history and genealogy.
http://www.markhamberczysettlers.ca/

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is great! Our Church has started to use it to develop an online catalogue for its collection. I have help with the entering but I may go in and make sure the Dewey numbers match the numbers assigned. LibraryThing has the ability to have a number of different views. It is easy to change the choices in the display. For example, it defaults to LC classification and you may want to change it to Dewey Decimal.

My home collection is not catalogued. It is roughly arranged. I will have to decide whether I might what to add location tags e.g. office, hall bookshelves, etc. For my book, I uploaded the cover so that it shows. If there is no cover showing for a book you can see if a cover has been uploaded by someone and you can add it.

As a cataloguer it is strange not to be thinking of Marc coding. It is easy to add new items. I chose to add some other sources to the defaults provided. Since some of my books are not in the databases searched, I will have to add some manually. Archives & Recordkeeping was added manually. You do not get to enter subject headings when you do it manually. I had to concentrate so that I did not add the coding that is used when cataloguing at the Library. It has become second nature.

The developers of this site have made it easy for everyone to use. It is also fun to see how many have the same books as you do.

To see what I have added so far --
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/researchergal