JANUARY

FEBRUARY

26-27 St George, UT. Talks on Unofficial Footnote Blog, and RootsWorks: Family Photos.

27 Fairfax VA (skype). Footnote workshop. (Yes, with the internet, you can be two places at once).

MARCH

APRIL

26-27 Salt Lake City UT. Brigham Young University’s Conference on Computerized Family History and Genealogy. Talks on Amazing Stories from Rev War pensions, Newspapers, City Directories, and other original records online. (moved from 12-13 Mar in Provo).

MAY

JUNE

25-26 Loveland CO. Family History Expo. Talks on Automated Search Tools, a Legacy demo, and a recollection of stories about the early days of Footnote. Oh, and a keynote talk on trying to explain genealogy to the rest of your family.

JULY

AUGUST

27-28 Sandy UT. Family History Expo.

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

8-9 Pleasanton CA. Family History Expo.
17  Las Vegas, NV. Jewish Genealogy Society of Southern Nevada.

NOVEMBER

12-13 Atlanta GA. Family History Expo.

DECEMBER

Felloe. This refers to a circular rim, such as the part of a wagon wheel, to which spokes are attached. A metal rim might go around the outside of the felloe. I find references in the 1800’s to people whose occupation is “felloe-maker” and “felloe-bender.”

Gutta percha. This is a form of natural rubber (chemically different from natural rubber, but having similar properties) introduced to the west in 1843. It came from trees, like rubber does. I find these occupational variations:

• foreman gutta percha
• gutta percha
• gutta percha carriage cloths
• gutta percha worker
• gutta percha works
• gutta perscha worker

It was popular enough that they made golf balls out of it.

Puddler. These workers use the Welsh method to convert pig iron into wrought iron by puddling – or melting the iron. Think of them as metalworkers, like steelworkers in the 1950’s.

• Beer man. They hadn’t even invented pro baseball leagues, but SF had a beer man. Well, several. I think it is short for “beer manufacturer.” But it’s a great job title.
• Whitesmith. I’ve heard of blacksmiths, but a whitesmith? Turns out, the guys who work with the “white” metals, like tin, aluminum, and pewter, are called whitesmiths. Most of their work is done with cold metals, unlike their blacksmith buddies. If you have a pewter cup around the house, it might have come from a whitesmith.
• Wm Light was a “billiard table.” I’m thinking that this is an imprecise description of his occupation.
• Capt Edw King was a “boarding officer.” That’s something, an officer, a captain, and a king.
• There were many bakers, but only Wm Hoar was a “cake baker.” Specialization rears its ugly head. J Joseph is a “soda cracker baker.”
• Sam’l Price was a consul, for Chili. I think they mean the place we call Chile today, but a chili ambassador is a terrific job.
• I’m not saying that they had mental issues, but there were dozens of counsellors. One Atty at law. Many Counsellors.
• They had the normal mix of coopers, chandlers, and draughtsmen.
• There were several daguerreotypists. I can’t even say the word. They took pictures.
• Wharfinger. I like that. A guy that runs a wharf is a wharfinger. His helper, like H G Isaacs, would be a “deputy wharfinger.”
• Philip Ramez and Thomas Watson are each occupied as a “gentleman.” I’m sure there were lots of roughmen, but they assume you know it already.
• You might expect hair dressers, but Jame McGowan was a “hair braider.”
• Chas Smith was a knickerbocker. I don’t know what one of these does. I can imagine the teasing his son must have endured on the playground.
• I found almost a dozen guys listed as “lighterman.” I’m thinking that they light street lamps. Then again, there are “boatmen” and a lighter is a kind of boat. The lightermen never hang out with the tanners.
• We have “mariner” and “master mariner.” There are also pilots, who must be specific: “outer harbor,” or “Sac and San Joaquin Rivers.”
• A number of people referred to their profession as “refreshments.” That’s … refreshing.
• Orrin Bailey was a “scrivener.” If you have a scrivener, a sadler, and a shingler, you have the beginnings of a joke. “A scrivener, a sadler, and a shingler walked into a bar …”
• I don’t know what you do if your occupation is “sporting.” I’m thinking – gambling? Big game hunting? Discus throw? Dart throwing?
• Mark Palmer got nothing from Oz that he didn’t already have. Yes, he was the Tinman. I didn’t find a cowardly lion.
• There were 3 artists, one woodcut engraver, 3 musicians (Andrew Truper couldn’t avoid the trade). I’m not sure whether a painter was an artist or not. I’m not sure whether golfers are athletes, either. I’m sure that dart throwing is not a sport. No dancers. No singers. There are personnel at the Dramatic Museum, but no one claiming to be an actor.
• I saw two carpenters named Sawyer. I don’t believe in fate. None of the masons was named Mason.
• Three men were “measurers.” Since all three worked at City Hall, it looks like political favoritism to me, and I’m skeptical about the veracity of their work. I got no idea what they measured.

The more I learn about the past, the more I’m amazed that we’ve lasted this long. Today, I looked at hundreds of occupation names that real people had in San Francisco in 1850. The unexpected discovery is my favorite kind of learning. Some time I’ll dig up the occupation codes invented for the 1850 census, and we’ll see if we can have a laugh.

I try to understand what life was like for people in other times. It requires some imagination, and some familiarity with the particulars. No electricity, no pavement, no cars … that means mud and horse manure in the streets. Geez, I don’t think they even had TRAINS in San Francisco in 1850. Here is the publisher’s preface, describing the challenges of creating a directory for that time and place:

It is not to be expected, in a City like this, where whole Streets are built up in a week and whole Squares swept away in an hour—where the floating population numbers thousands and a large portion of the fixed inhabitants live in tents and places which cannot be described with any accuracy, that a Directory can be got up with the correctness that they are in older and more established cities. We have scarcely a house numbered, and what there are will puzzle quite as much as assist.

The “floating population?” I can imagine lots of people living in ships and boats at the time. It’s a vivid image.

The other subject is that of bell-ringing as it is now practiced for our churches. We have seen the whole congregation of a religious meeting start from their seats at the ringing of the bells of other churches, supposing it was for fire; and how are our firemen to know whether the bells are ringing to call them with all their powers, to fight the devouring flames, or,with their most devotional feelings, to attend a prayer meeting. How widely different the objects, yet the same summons, put forth in the same manner, calls them to both. This is certainly wrong, and we think our City Council should make it the duty of bell-ringers, in all cases of business or for Church, to set the bells at regular intervals, as they do in the Atlantic cities.

I don’t hear much public bell-ringing, beyond that Big-Ben-type quarter-hour thing that we used to have at A&M. In modern life, we don’t empathize with bell-ringing related issues. Outside of Quasimodo, most people can’t name a bell-ringer. But if we’re going to live in close proximity, we’re going to need some rules. Someone is going to have to decide whether we pass on the right or the left. Someone is going to have to set the clocks. That someone is all of us, in the persons of governmental officials.

Fires and fire alarms have been a constant subject for people. There hasn’t been a “great fire” in over 100 years in the US, and we can lose sight of it. Recently, a fire destroyed many documents at the Indiana Historical Society. We all know that the past was different from the present. This book has a couple of vivid examples.

Salt Lake City, Utah. 1869.

NOTE: This is not intended to be the definitive history of the Utah Territory, or even represented as an objective view of the events of 1847-1868. It’s just what was published in 1869 – a historical view of history.

I’ve tried to extract the text accurately. If you see typographical errors, notify me, and I’ll correct them if I can.  - Beau

City Directories have more than just names in them. In many ways, they contain unique information about the cultural heritage of a place. The 1869 Salt Lake City directory was published by Edwards & Co of Chicago IL. After the classified listings in the back of the book, they included a great deal of history and many ads from the Chicago directory – but that’s a story for another day. This story is a “Sketch of Mormonism.”

I am not a member of the LDS Church. Many of my friends and colleagues are. Is it for their enjoyment that I extract this pearl. History changes, over time. Here’s a look backward, from the vantage point of 1869, at the founding of the LDS church.

With no further editorial comment, and with apologies in advance for typographical errors, I offer the following historical note.

SKETCH OF MORMONISM

Joseph Smith, the founder of the organization, was born in Sharon, Windsor county, Vermont, December 23d, 1805. His father’s name was Joseph and his mother’s Lucy; and their family consisted of six sons and three daughters of whom the future prophet was the third Sod. When he was in his fourteenth year his father moved to Manchester, Ontario county, New York, having previously resided four years in Palmyra in the same county. While in Manchester, and during a religious revival, he was, as he states in his autobiography, the subject of religious impressions; during which, while praying in the woods one day, he had the first vision, two glorious personages appearing to him, who communed with him. Some three and a half years afterwards, on the 21st of September, 1823, he had a second vision and received a communication relative to the plates upon which the Book of Mormon was inscribed. These plates, his history states, he obtained possession of on the 22d of September, 1827, from the place of their deposit, on the west side of a hill convenient to Manchester, the village where he resided. The plates were enclosed in a box, covered with a stone, and had been there for some 1400 years, having been buried by an ancient inhabitant of this continent named Moroni. The characters on them had been principally inscribed by Mormon, hence the title of the work.

Being poor and with the work of translating the records before him, in his exigencies he obtained assistance from a gentleman named Martin Harris; and in April, 1829, he made the acquaintance of Oliver Cowdery, a school teacher, who became his amenuensis, and the work of translating commenced immediately. The Book of Mormons, was put in the hands of the printers; but before it was published a church was organized on the 6th day of April, 1830, in the house of Mr. Peter Whitmer, Fayette, Seneca county, New York. Thus the Empire State not only produced the plates, from which the book was translated, but can claim the honor of the organization of that society which is the greatest problem of the century. Six members composed this church on its organization, a small beginning for the thousands into which it has grown and the power and influence acquired in the short space of thirty-eight years. The Book of Mormon was published, preaching and proselytizing were prosecuted with vigor, though the missionaries of the new faith were mostly uneducated, and churches were raised up in a number of places in a few months.

Early in 1831 a settlement was made at Kirtland, Ohio, and this may be called the first “gathering place” of the church—a central point towards which all who received the faith should converge. In July of the same year a lot was selected and dedicated, for a Temple, at Independence, Jackson county, Missouri. Here a printing press was set .in operation and a periodical, the Evening and Morning Star, was published by Judge “W. W. Phelps. Trouble broke out at Independence, between the settlers of the new faith and others inhabiting that region, and a mob tore down the printing office, tarred and feathered some of the prominent Mormons, abused others, and inflicted losses on the fraternity, in the destruction of property, to a very large amount. The Mormons were obliged to leave, and most of them fled into and settled in Clay county, in the same state. The Jackson county mob influenced the citizens of Clay county, and after a time the refugees had again to leave, this time settling in unoccupied territory, which received the name of Caldwell county, as well as in Davis and other adjacent counties, in Missouri. In three years they, made wonderful improvements in their new location, for industry has ever been a prominent characteristic of the  organization. At this time they were viewed with suspicion by many pro-slavery citizens there, who classed them as abolitionists, many of them having com from states where the abolition theory was gaining ground. For this cause, and because their industrious habits conflicted with the dissipated customs of a class always too well known in frontier settlements, as well as for religious reasons, troubles again broke out and the entire Mormon community was compelled to leave the state. Their next settlement was at Commerce, Hancock county, Illinois, where in a short time they built the city of Nauvoo, which was duly chartered by the state Legislature. They had built a temple at Kirtland, which was an immense effort in its size and costliness for so small and poor a body of people as they then were. But in Nauvoo one was commenced on a scale proportionately greater to correspond with their increased numbers, wealth and importance. This they finished, but before it was completed, their Prophet, Joseph Smith, and his brother Hyrum Smith, the Patriarch of the Church, were murdered in Carthage, where they were imprisoned on a charge of treason. The Missouri enemies of the prophet and his followers, had never ceased their efforts against him and his people, preferring charge after charge which were disposed of by the courts, he always obtained an acquittal; until this last charge, when the mob would not wait for the result of a trial, but shot him and his brother dead while in prison under guard, wounding at the same time Elder John Taylor, one of the Twelve Apostles. They held Governor Ford’s pledge for their safety at the time. This was on the 27th of June, 1844.

Soon after the Mormons were compelled to leave Illinois, and took up their line of march in February, 1846, for the then almost unknown west. That Fall and Winter the main body of the refugee Saints located in the neighborhood of the Missouri River, near what is now Council Bluffs and Omaha, where temporary settlements were formed. Next Spring, President Brigham Young started westward with 143 pioneers, broke a road, forded streams and built bridges from the Missouri over the great plains and through the Rocky Mountains, arriving in Salt Lake Valley on the 21st of July, 1847. As soon after as possible the main body followed, a provisional State government was formed, gentlemen were sent to Washington to represent the new colony; and in 1849 a Territorial government was granted to them for the Territory of Utah. Since that time they have prospered exceedingly; their cities, towns and settlement» number about two hundred with a population of nearly 150,000 souls. Besides these there are branches of the Church in many parts of the United States; and in Europe the communicants of the faith number nearly 20,000. Their missionary efforts have been directed to every country where religious toleration would permit them to carry and disseminate their views. Most European and some Asiatic nations, as well as Australia and several of the Pacific Islands, have given proselytes to the faith; and almost all the old members of the Church are native born citizens of the Union, which still adds largely to the believers in the latter.day dispensation.

The Church is organized with a First Presidency of three; a Council of Twelve Apostles; a Patriarch; a quorum of High Priests of indefinite number; sixty-four quorums of Seventies; an Elders’ Quorum; a Presidency of three and a High Council of twelve for each Stake of Zion; a Presiding Bishop for the Church with two Counselors; a Bishop for each Ward; a Priests’ quorum; a Teachers’ quorum; and a Deacons’ quorum.

The present authorities of the Church are:

• Brigham Young, President; George A. Smith his first and Daniel H. Wells his second counselor.
• Orson Hyde, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and Orson Pratt, Sr., John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Ezra T. Benson, Charles C. Rich, Lorenzo Snow, Erastus Snow, Franklin D. Richards, George Q. Cannon, Joseph F. Smith and Brigham Young, Jr., members.
• John Smith, Patriarch.
• John Young, President of the High Priests’ Quorum; Edwin D. Wooley and Samuel W. Richards counselors.
• Joseph Young, President of the first seven Presidents of the Seventies, and Levi W. Hancock, Henry Harriman, Albert P. Rockwood, Horace S. Eldredge, Jacob Gates, and John Van Cott, members of the first seven Presidents of the Seventies.
• Edward Hunter, Presiding Bishop, Leonard W. Hardy and Jeese C. Little, his counselors.
• George A. Smith, Historian and general Church Recorder, and Wilford Woodruff, assistant.

I was at the Newspaper Archives site, looking at the home page. There’s a search box there, as you can see from the picture below.

owwww

It’s a nice looking home page. Not too cluttered, cool photos, clearly labeled functions. I tried to search for my last name. The small box says …. “Please enter a valid last name and (optional) first name.” Well, I didn’t know which Sharbroughs, if any, would be in the index, so I entered my last name and no first name. It’s optional, right? Here’s what I got.

I think that they are either saying 1) that my name is not valid; or 2) that the word “optional” has a different meaning than I have previously understood.

Either way, when a site behaves this way, I assume that the people who make it don’t want me to use the site. I oblige them.

I hope that you have better luck than I did.

Oh, and did you hear that World Vital Records is promoting NewsPaper archives? Notice that Newspaper Archives is going for about $12 for a monthly, and about $60 for a yearly (billed monthly). World Vital Records is offering a year of both for $71.88. I’m not sure about the tag line, “This is the lowest price you will ever find.” I can think of 7,187 lower prices.

1. More input!

Online census collections consist of a searchable index with links to images of the original microfilm. Those indexes are a partial transcription of the records, often containing the name, age, state of birth, house number, relationship to head of household; and some fields related to the page, such as state, county, enumeration district, page number, and microfilm roll number. This makes it easier to find records. However, if you are researching a common name in a heavily populated area, you will wish for more information.

The information available varies with each census year. It is common to find additional information, which is of great value to genealogists, such as:

• Number of years married. Lets you estimate a marriage year.
• Number of children that a parent has. Since some of the children move out of the house when they get older, it’s helpful to know this.
• If naturalized.
• Year naturalized.
• Birth state or country (this is indexed as often as not).
• Occupation. One researcher told me that she found her guy several states away from the place she expected by searching on a surname and occupation.
• Parents birth places.
• Language spoken.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but to suggest that not all census collections are alike. Researchers may find that they want to pay for access to collections having features which are not available in a free version.

The reasons that the indexes are not complete transcriptions are valid ones. Computers can’t read handwritten records. Publishers have to pay people to read the images and key the fields. This is expensive, often costing ten times as much as scanning the microfilm.

2. Where was that?

Beginning with the 1880 census, the leftmost columns contain the heading “In cities.” The street name and street number are included for city residents. This is known, in modern times, as a street address. Having the street address opens up a world of geo-coded information possibilities, including maps and satellite images. Experienced researchers often identify churches and saloons located near the homes and workplaces of research subjects, for example. Or, you might want to know the route to the nearest school.

If you knew that your ancestor had the same address in 1880 and 1900, wouldn’t you think you had a good shot at reconstructing an 1890 census record for them?

Genealogy has been propelled to new heights during the past decade, by the availability of digital databases such as those found on Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. In my view, this industry is maturing, as evidenced by the wide availability of US census and UK census collections.

Not only does Ancestry.com have a full US census collection. So does Heritage Quest (only available through libraries). Footnote has published 1860 and 1930. I recently saw most of the censuses between 1850 and1900 on FamilySearch.org, with images linked. The fee to access this information on that site is … free.

Ancestry’s recent IPO has apparently resulted in some “me too” decisions by companies to create similar sites. Footnote has announced that they will complete the US census. Other companies are quietly working on digitizing census records. To the genealogy researcher, the impact is that the prices will fall, until it gets all the way down to … free.

And what will happen then? Large genealogy publishers will not want to close up shop. They will need to publish something else. There is a significant amount of immigration and military record data going online.

The titles that publishers digitize fit into two broad categories. Some of them, like census records and civil war pensions, are complete collections in one place. These records have a single records custodian, such as the National Archives. Others, like gravestones, are fragmented, located in dozens, hundreds, or thousands of places. There are many records custodians.

The challenge for publishers is that they are rapidly approaching the point where all of the “complete collections” for markets like the US and UK are online, and the day that they’ll be free is clearly coming. They have little choice but to go forward with fragmented titles.

American researchers have been somewhat spoiled by the availability of Ancestry’s census collection. One web site. Every record. In the UK, it was split over four sites, until recently, when Find My Past completed a UK census collection. UK researchers can counsel their american colleagues about what happens next.

I’ll speculate about three kinds of fragmented US records that I think will be increasingly available: vital records, gravestones, and historical newspapers.

Vital records are kept by the states. This creates increased complexity for publishers, because the rights and the media come from 50 places, instead of one. The truth is, it’s more complicated than that. In some states, the counties are the records custodians. And with states such as Massachusetts, the state only has records after a certain date, and there are unique collections of records in many towns. There is no central index of vital records for the US. That’s one of the attractions of the census – it’s an implied birth record, by showing the child with the parents, and the age of the child at a certain date. There is a nice index of deaths in the SSDI, but it has very few entries for deaths before 1962, and many people did not participate in social security (such as state employees like teachers, and federal employees like … social security workers!).

Gravestones are about as fragmented as a collection of records can be. They are literally all over the US. Many sites, both paid and free of fees, contain some gravestones. There is no centralized index of gravestones. They make a good vital record, often containing information about birth dates, death dates, and even names of relatives.

Newspapers were once the primary means of distributing and receiving news, and there were many more newspapers in the past than there are today. Some of them have been lost. Some of them are in the hands of large publishers today, such as Gannet or Hearst. Many have been collected by NewsBank, and are available to genealogy researchers through GenealogyBank.

There are two kinds of problems with creating a central index over fragmented records. While the first is to achieve any degree of thoroughness, the other is to achieve a degree of consistency. Not all vital records contain the same information. Many existing databases contain partial information extracted from the records, and the parts in one database are not the same parts as are in others.

The same is true of gravestone databases available today.

And newspapers? For the most part, newspapers are OCR’d as a large “text blob” for each page. If you search for “Brown” you will find that the word is used in many contexts, and most of them are not as a family name. If you’re lucky enough to be a Sharbrough, your searches that turn up exact hits are always interesting, but if the OCR quality or the spelling isn’t just right, you will be unable to locate the articles you like. In short, current newspaper processing methods don’t identify name parts, date parts, connections between persons and employers, and the like.

There is a great deal of useful genealogical information left for publishers to sell us. At present, it would seem that they have a difficult decision to make. Perhaps it would be helpful if researchers could tell publishers more about what kinds of records they want most, and in what format they want to find, organize, and share them.

RootsWorks: Spreadsheet Basics

A lot of the information we come across just doesn’t line up neatly into rows and columns. Intuition tells us we can’t put our records into spreadsheets. Practice, on the other hand, has shown that putting our records into rows and columns is great for two reasons: (1) it helps us see what’s missing, and (2) it helps us understand what’s there! Most people have a spreadsheet programs on their computers, and it’s time to put these programs to work on our family history mysteries.

What Is It?

Spreadsheets are not new. We’ve had them as long as we’ve had ledger paper. I remember using four-, 10-, and 20-column paper. It was a useful tool for lining up numbers, but it couldn’t automatically update the ledger when I changed one of the numbers.

Electronic spreadsheets simulate ledger paper. They contain words, numbers, and formulas—arranged in rows and columns. Typically, a spreadsheet is a list of similar items, with each row representing a particular item and each column representing some particular characteristic of those items.

For example, if your family history program can export a report to a spreadsheet, you might make a list of names, birth dates, birthplaces, death dates, and death places. The spreadsheet would lay the information out so that each row represented a person in your report and each column represented, say, the person’s name, birth date, or death information. If your data is like mine, some entries are missing.

Name Two of Them

There are three popular electronic spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Corel’s Quattro Pro. They can all read each other’s files, and they perform the same basic functions. I’m partial to Excel, because I use Microsoft Access a lot, and Excel works well with Access.

When It Works, What Does It Do?

As I mentioned above, spreadsheets can be really useful in several ways. I want to focus on the basics at this time. In each cell of a worksheet, you will find a word, a number, or a formula. Formulas give worksheets power because they can easily be copied to produce effective lists of numbers. Then, when the information has been entered, it can be sorted in ways that make it easier to spot missing data and clean up data that is clearly wrong, such as two-digit numbers in a column that is supposed to hold years.

What’s the Downside?

I don’t see a down side to improving one’s skills with spreadsheets, but there are a couple of things to warn you about. One is that you should learn the “Save” and “Save As” functions first. I really don’t like to hear that people have lost an hour’s worth of work because they did not save their file. I also don’t like it when I change a worksheet and then save it over the original accidentally. You won’t need to make these mistakes many times before you master these two processes.

Another is learning how to copy formulas. If you learn a few of the basics, you can avoid having to retype formulas—you can simply copy them like the wind (but be careful not to ruin a trailer home).

How Do I Know If It’s Not Working?

I sometimes get the dreaded #NAME# as a formula result. That’s almost always a sign that I’ve attempted to perform an arithmetic function on a word. This is especially tricky when the value in the cell is a number, but it has a space or two in front of it and looks like a word. Spreadsheets see such entries as words and don’t perform arithmetic functions on them well.

What If I Change Computers?

As a rule, you’ll want to reinstall the software and copy your data. You can easily copy your worksheets to a floppy disk or CD. Be sure to make copies so you can use them. And one caveat: If you make formulas that link to other worksheets, they will only work if the folder names and paths on the new computer are the same as on the old one (such as C:\My Documents\My Genealogy).

What’s the Genealogy Tie-in?

Spreadsheets are excellent tools for tracking census information for a family across a number of censuses. They can also help you spot hidden patterns in some historical lists, if you gather information from multiple sources of records, such as church records, immigration records, and “old country” records.

Link Me Up (More stars is better)

Techweb Encyclopedia - A definition of a spreadsheet [link]

Learning about Excel **** - A course from Furman University that you can read online.

Cyndi’s List – Forms **** - Cyndi has a lot of forms links, and some of them are usable in Excel.

What Else?

Spreadsheets are the “baking soda” of computer programs; people put them to a variety of uses. Some people use them for graphics programs, some people use them for databases, and some people use them for electronic forms.

One of my favorite capabilities is called “conditional formatting.” This is a feature that changes the format of a particular cell based on its content, or the relationship between the content and some other cell. With this function, it is possible, for example, to average a column of numbers and to display the numbers above the average in red and the numbers below the average in blue.

Beau Sharbrough is the president of GENTECH, the founder of the GENTECH and FGS Web sites, and a founder of the Lexicon Working Group. He would like to hear from you at beau@sharbrough.net, but due to the volume of e-mail received, he is unable to answer every e-mail message received. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual computer problems. Visit Beau’s Web site for information about speaking engagements. Beau is the father of two college-age girls and is another insufferable graduate of Texas A&M University.

[Disclaimer - this was in 2001. The girls are older now]