Obituary Committee

North Central Iowa
Genealogical Society
Box 237
Mason City, Iowa 50402-0237

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Obituary
Meets: 10:00 AM
Tuesday
October 14, 2008
Video Conference Room
Clear Lake Telephone Company
Clear Lake, Iowa

Executive
Meets: 12:30 PM
Saturday
October 4, 2008
Mason City Room
Mason City Public Library
Mason City, Iowa

Program
Meets: Immediately Following NCIGS Meeting
Saturday
October 4, 2008
Mason City Room
Mason City Public Library
Mason City, Iowa

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From their home computers volunteers post North Central Iowa obituaries to our online archive in real time.

Obituary Committee Record . . .

Obituary Committee Bulletin
> click here <

March 13 Committee Meeting

The old PAF-Ways website was renewed for one year. The fact is in order to bring the obituaries over from the PAF-Ways site to the NCIGS site is going to require more time. The cost to renew the site is $100.00 for a year, I charged it to my AmExp card. I will visit with Bill Bjerke to request a check from our special fund. This is part of those unknown expenses. Yes, PAF-Ways folded, and yes we have given our assets to the NCIGS as we agreed, but part of PAF-Ways (the obituary project) is still in operation and is transitioning over to the NCIGS. Hopefully we will not have any more of these – but that is why we have earmarked the account to cover events such as this.
In order to allow prior year obituary updates to transfer over to NCIGS – we will create subwebs out of earlier years. For example the year 2002 can be converted to a subweb. Then a volunteer can bring over obituaries from the PAF-Ways site, publish to the NCIGS site without disturbing current work on a particular newspaper. We’ll work those details out on an individual basis and make certain everyone is in sync before we proceed. Bottom line – it may well take a year to bring over all the old obits currently on the PAF-Ways site.
Jay Lehmann mentioned a feature he found in FrontPage that will help remove extraneous tables that come over when we copy obituaries. I had never seen it, so I tested it when I got home today. Jay is right. Under “Table” / “Convert” / “Table to Text” the key removes the extraneous tables. BUT – it also opened a door to MACROS. MACROS are instructions we give to our computers to remember a sequence of repetitive keystrokes so we don’t have to feel like gerbils performing the same mindless keystroke combinations over and over. It’s too early to crow, but my early work says: “We can create a macro that runs the keystroke that invokes the Table to Text routine, then highlights the decedents name, bold faces it and sets its size to 14 point.

Expect a review of creating Macros at our next meeting in March if this all actually works.
Now that the forms are working on the NCIGS website Marie reports she has already received four Research Requests. Some are junk, but we are going to analyze the submissions and then add several more lines to the form to focus our visitors requests away from general to specific. It’s part of our high prices education.
We decided to table setting up a Pay-Pal account until some future time when the society needs to address it.

1/3/07
Obituary Manual Under Construction
Marie Thompson and Loren Toomsen completed the second phase of preparing a concise manual that gives detailed instructions on creating new obituary archives. Although we are currently built several years ahead the day will come when we need to create future archives.

Loren wrote a manual recently. Today Marie Thompson tried to interpret that manual. In the process language was made easier to understand. As Loren puts it, "If I get run over by an ugly truck, with Marie's PHD method, future committee members should have no problem creating new archives and adding them to the current project."

Mason City is virtually done. The other archives will be easy to write once Mason City is complete. The over riding idea is to build archives about once every five years. This manual is an instruction set to the future.

2/12/07
PAF-Ways PAY-Pay Account

The PAF-Ways PayPal account was closed in 2003 when Loren Toomsen passed the role of Treasurer to Chuck Prickett. Chuck opened a personal account with PayPal and simply aimed PAF-Ways business to his personal account, then reimbursed PAF-Ways when business occurred. There is no PAF-Ways Pay-Pal account.

Address Research Requests to: research@ncigs.org

North Central Iowa Genealogical Society Box 237 Mason City, Iowa 50402-0237 641 423-0487 contact@ncigs.org
	Our Corporate Sponsor 1996 thru 2008