Topic: “Reconstructing the Families of a Czech Village: Modřejovice in Central Bohemia”
Speaker: Wesley Johnston
Aug 1st at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time
Description:
CAGC is excited and honored to have our own CAGC Member Wesley Johnston as our guest speaker! The Zoom link will be sent out the Thurs before the meeting.
His web page lists an abstract of the records that he has found, showing all people and houses in the village, sorted by house number and by name.
He will discuss some of the steps and challenges to create a large family surname database including formulas for using MS Excel spreadsheets:
*How to break the work into phases
*How to present the work as it progresses
*How to deal with standardizing spellings
*How to deal with Czech diacritical marks in
spreadsheets and web pages
*A strategy for dealing with old handwriting
and bad handwriting in records
*How to keep track of things in a way that the
work can be set aside and easily picked up
later
*How to discover and present the meta-level
insights that are hidden in the records
Wesley’s Biography: Wesley began his family history research in 1954 when he inherited the Johnston Family Bible. His mother’s grandparents came to Chicago from Central Bohemia in the 1870’s, and Wesley visited the Czech lands in 1981 and 2011. He has written many articles and books about family history, local history, World War II history and Art history. His family history webpage: https://wwjohnston.net/famhist/modrejovice-all.htm . He holds a master’s degree in history and mathematics.
