MUSIC

I have had several hobbies during my lifetime. Music was my first hobby and it almost became a profession. I was just fourteen years old when I began taking singing lesson. My teacher Arminta Mathews, who determined that I was a coloratura soprano, taught me how to sing simple hymns for my church, songs from Broadway musicals and Grand Opera arias. After I graduated from high school, I had my own radio program on Sunday evenings at Boise, Idaho, called “Elaine Sings.” Later, when I was married and moved to California, I joined an opera group and sang the leading role in several operas.

WRITING

Another hobby was reading and writing. I loved to read novels about medical men and women. This led to my entering the profession and I became a Registered Nurse on my 35th birthday. After a few years of working in doctor’s offices, I opened a private vocational school for the training of health careers. Because doctors were just beginning to use computers in their offices, I decided my students should learn how to use them, too. I had become fairly proficient in the use of one so I taught my instructors the things I wanted my students to learn. During this time, I began writing. My first published work was in 1975: a textbook published by Harper & Row (now Harper Collins). It was called “The Medical Office: Organization and Management.” A second edition was published in 1980. I also wrote various articles for medical magazines. But my desire was to someday write “the great American novel.”

When my husband retired, I sold the school and started working on that “great American novel.” I found an ad in a writer’s magazine by a Hank Searls that he was accepting students on a one-on-one basis (for a fee, of course) to help them write a novel. I recognized his name as the author of one of my favorite books “Overboard” which I had read a few years earlier. I responded to his ad and he accepted me as a student. It took two years to complete my novel. But it sat on the shelf for another three years before it was published.

Premonition

GENEALOGY

In the meantime, my husband had passed on and I had become interested in working on genealogy – my third hobby. I found that my proficiency with computers had become invaluable. Research was done mostly with computers and I became addicted. I wanted to share my knowledge so I spent two years in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a Family History missionary helping people find their ancestors. While there, I wrote another book called “Learning the New Personal Ancestral File 5.0 With Quick and Easy Instructions.” It was and is still being published today by Granite Publishers of Orem, Utah. Today I live in California. I’m still writing, but not novels - now I’m writing books on how to do research. And I am still helping people find their ancestors… and I am still searching for mine. The work goes on. It never ends. There’s always someone out there that needs to be found and added to my family tree…. And yours.

Example for a birth record about 1800