PORT ANGELES — The Clallam County Genealogical Society’s general membership meeting will feature a program by Raymond Madsen on “The 1812 War Pension Papers” on Saturday.
The meeting, which is open to the public, will be from 10 a.m. to noon at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St. Visitors can come early for refreshments and fellowship.
The war pension records contain information on military service, deaths, marriages, land warrants and migration.
History department
Madsen worked for the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He was a British reference consultant at the Family History Library for 10 years and a product manager for FamilySearch for 23 years, producing the first of the FamilySearch databases, including the IGI, Ancestral File and the Social Security Death Indexes.
As technology improved, he led the development of many of the CD resources for home use, including Vital and Census records and Personal Ancestral File.
Community Tree
The past few years, he led the team developing the online Community Tree projects, which worked with local historical and genealogical societies to reconstruct the families in a sourced lineage database.
These community trees began in the village of Millville in New Brunswick, Canada, and Lewis County, and have since spread all over the world, including oral genealogies in Ghana, Africa and the Polynesian islands.
After working for the Family History Department for 33 years, Madsen retired in 2011 and moved to Sequim with his wife, Nila.
For more information, phone 360-417-5000 between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays.