Ancestor profile of the week - Paul Holly (Hollopeter)

Thanks to Dawnette for posting a comment on my earlier blog post from 12/13/2012.  This was on the post "Documenting the HOLLY / HOLLOPETER / MARTIN family connection" which can be found at Hollopeter post

Dawnette posted a comment to the effect that Paul Hollopeter had also changed his surname to Holly.  Based on this information I searched ancestry for Paul Holly and was able to find an SSDI entry and a California Death Index entry.  Following is the information I have collected so far on Paul:

Name: Paul HOLLOPETER

Sex:         Male

Father: Harlow Bryant HOLLOPETER (1859-1951)

Mother: Ella B. VARNER (1864-1957)

Birth         6 May 1899 Creighton, Cass, Missouri, United States

Census 22 Apr 1910 Bear Creek Township, Henry, Missouri, United States

Occupation 1919 Agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad Company; Henry, Missouri, United States

Death 4 Jan 1991 (age 91) Palm Springs, Riverside, California, United States

Alt. Name Paul HOLLY

Marriages/Children

1. Bernice WHITE (1900-1985)

Marriage 2 Aug 1919 Clinton, Henry, Missouri, United States

Children Gene HOLLOPETER (1925-    )

Obviously I have much more research to do on Paul (census and military records) but I now have a good foundation to work from.

Lost in summer things and genealogy software program change to RootsMagic 6

It has been quite some time since my last post.  It has also been quite some time since I've done any serious family history research.  Been very busy with "summer" things.  Mostly Grand kid's related.   Many many baseball games, overnight visits and cookouts.  I've really enjoyed my summer.

Now it's time to get back to family history.  Lot's of things have been happening, especially over at Familysearch.  I've been working on loading the family tree into the new Family Tree program there.  I was doing this manually as my current software program (Legacy 7.5) is still not working with Family Tree.  I decided it was time to give RootsMagic 6 a try.

So far I'm very pleased with the program.  Fairly simple to use and the interface with the familysearch Family Tree is great.  I have spent several hours viewing the on line "how to" webinars to become familiar with the program.  So now I'm using two genealogy software program Family Tree Maker 2012 (to sync with my family tree on Ancestry and RootsMagic 6 to sync with my tree on familysearch.  At some point in the future I'm going to have to decide which one to work with as my primary.  I really don't want to be maintaining two different programs.

I imported my Legacy database directly into RootsMagic without going through a gedcom.  For the most part everything appears to have worked fairly well.  Of course, the sources all came in without the sourcewriter (ee format) style.  Also many of the locations shown in the census and residence facts was dumped into the description field instead of the place field.  Using standard RootsMagic queries / filters I've been able to identify the problem records easily.  Now I'm working on cleanup.  Re-linking the images was also very easily done in RM.

One good thing about switching programs and the resulting file cleanup process is that it forces you to look carefully at your data again.  I'm seeing several areas that need some real detailed review and cleanup.  My "To Do List" is growing daily.

Hopefully I will also get back on track with this blog, posting more family information.