Education sessions

Last week we held the first education session regarding the new database system that will be implemented in June. It was a terrible experience. Pretty much everything went wrong. It turned out that the test database couldn't cope with that many people logged on at once. It crashed. We desperately tried to make the best of the situation and gave a completely unprepared presentation instead. I had the biggest and most complicated part. This experience was so bad we had to have a debriefing afterwards. The next day we had a session again and it went better because now we knew we had to give a presentation. I talked for over an hour and there were many questions (some of which we couldn't answer...). I have never really done something like this but my colleagues said I did well. For the next sessions starting tomorrow the technicians have made improvements to the test database. Hopefully, it will cope with the work load.

Saturday I went to the archive center to use some of their databases I don't have access to myself. One of my colleagues also joined me there. I visited mainly because my relative in Denmark called me and gave more details about a lost emigrant. I had gathered also other research questions and solved a few of them. I discovered some new information about emigrants on my father's side. While my grandfather was alive, I asked him if there were any living descendants of his aunt or first cousin who had emigrated to the US. He said that there were not. This is actually not correct. On the handwritten family tree put together probably by my grandmother more than 30 years ago there was a woman named Lynne born 1951 listed as a descendant. I have wondered about this and now I was able to find out more. Her mother died already in the 1950s and I think this might be why there was no more information, since the relationship was through her.