Genealogy Conference

[Lisa]

Saturday I went to MA with Buffy's Mom to attend the New England Family History Conference. I promised Buffy I would give a review. Aside from a near collison with a Tom Turkey flying across the highway, the day was great! If you are into genealogy, I would recommend you call your local Family History Center and find out if a conference is going to be held in your area. The conference was fantastic and it was basically free. The only thing we paid for was our lunch and a printed copy of the syllabus. We had the option of not buying lunch from them and printing the syllabus out on our printer but we opted not to. Lunch was terrific; we had turkey croissant sandwich, Cape Cod potato chips, a big chocolate chip cookie, seedless grapes, and a bottle of water.

Okay, now that we covered the food onto the day. It started with a discussion of the newFamilySearch.org family tree that will be introduced later this year. The idea is to bring every record ever existed readily available digitally thru their site. LDS is commiting to use computer technology and resources to unify and bring all the data together. If they can do it, it will be a great boost for genealogist.

Classes available were WWI & WWII Research, Research Logs, Civil War Research, Solving Really Tough Research Problems*, Intro to Genealogy Records at the MA State Archives, Finding your Irish Ancestral Home*, Italian Genealogy, Colonial Immigration - Who are they & Where did they come from*, Using Church Records to Identify Ancestors, The Big 4 U.S. Record Sources, Organizing your Paper Files, Personal Ancestral File, Documentating Sources in PAF, Getting to the Sources Online*, Effective Internet Strategies and Searches, Beyond Google, Scottish Research, Finding Descendents with Online Sources, Family History: Where to I begin, How to Write your Family History, German Research, Organizing & Dating your Photographs, Passenger Lists & Canadian Border Crossing.

As you can see, the topics were varied and appealed to all levels of genealogists. Those courses I took I put a * after it. If you see something you want more info on, email me and I'll see what I can do.

Lots of websites were listed throughout the book, here are some:

www.smalltownpapers.com
www.genealogybank.com
www.itd.nps.gov/cwss (Civil War)
www.tiara.ie (irish)
www.searchforancestors.com/passenger lists/ (Palatine passenger Lists)
www.jewishgen.org (jewish genealogy research)
www.searchbug.com (search for churches)
www.glorecords.blm.gov (Federal land records)
www.deathindexes.com/newyork (New York vital records online. For other state records go to the links at the bottom of the page.
http://genealogy.az.gov
http://content.sos.state.ga.us/cdm4/gadeaths.php
www.mdch.state.ml.us/pha/osr/gendisx/search2.htm
www.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
http://aad.archives.gov/aad/series-list.jsp?cat=GP21 (military casualty lists)
http://www.archives.gov/genealogy/naturalization/#links
www.genealogy.com
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
www.progenealogists.com I don't care for this site, it is basically a service for genealogy work

Okay, I think that should get everyone going and busy for awhile. I know sometimes we run into a wall, but this should jump start us. Happy Researching!

 

[PrincessNancy96]

OH, I will so have to read this again... DS11 is needing to be catered too.. his allergies are in full swing and he said he feels like a drunken sailor.. Now, how at 11 does he know how that feels. LOL

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

yeah you neglected to tell me my mother was almost murdered by a turkey!!!!

I'm glad ya'll had fun, consider it a warm up to WDW!

 

[PrincessNancy96]

A turkey.. Do tell.. Why did the turkey try to out your mom.. I mean it isn't like she was bringing him home for dinner!!! or was she??

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

if they killed it, they would have brought it home.

Have you ever seen a turkey fly??? yeah, someone forgot to tell them they aren't very good at it. It flew right in front of Lisa's car.

 

[Lisa]

Poor MomK got the driver's forearm across the chest action as I slammed on the breaks. And for a bird species that really doesn't fly, he was flying pretty high, windshield level.

Yup, Tom Turkey almost became dinner that night.

 

[PrincessNancy96]

OMG!!!

I didn't think they got that high off the ground either.. seems he had a death wish..

 

[piratesmate]

That sounds awesome, Lisa - except for the part about the turkey!

I just discovered GenealogyBank.com last week. I Googled free sites that might help my Jones-ing for census records and got re-directed there by one of them. The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn't on Ancestry's list of newspapers and I was intrigued to see it there. Their previews are fairly useless, but I ended up paying $9.99 for a 30-day trial. I'm seriously considering keeping it for the year. DH wasn't thrilled until I showed him the death notice for his great-grandfather, Gottlieb Schick. All we knew was that he was a baker, that he'd died "during a flu epidemic" and he was dead by the 1910 census.

 

[tinkryansmom]

That sounds awesome, Lisa - except for the part about the turkey!

I just discovered GenealogyBank.com last week. I Googled free sites that might help my Jones-ing for census records and got re-directed there by one of them. The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn't on Ancestry's list of newspapers and I was intrigued to see it there. Their previews are fairly useless, but I ended up paying $9.99 for a 30-day trial. I'm seriously considering keeping it for the year. DH wasn't thrilled until I showed him the death notice for his great-grandfather, Gottlieb Schick. All we knew was that he was a baker, that he'd died "during a flu epidemic" and he was dead by the 1910 census.

Congrats on the find piratesmate!!

I will check out these websites. Thanks for posting them Lisa.

 

[BernardandMissBianca]

Poor MomK got the driver's forearm across the chest action as I slammed on the breaks.

which she found absolutely hilarious!! Such a mom thing to do.

 

[Queenie]

That sounds like a great show, the best I've seen nearby was at the town hall and seemed only to be people handing out leaflets about how to look up birth/marriage/death records and finding graves. The "Solving Really Tough Research Problems" class sounds really interesting, what did it cover?

If anyone needs something looking up on English census records, I have a UK subscription to ancestry for a while (I'm letting it lapse this summer as I won't have much time with wedding planning) but I'd be happy to do look ups for you guys.

 

[Lisa]

That sounds like a great show, the best I've seen nearby was at the town hall and seemed only to be people handing out leaflets about how to look up birth/marriage/death records and finding graves. The "Solving Really Tough Research Problems" class sounds really interesting, what did it cover?

Queenie, pm me your email address and I'll send you the literature I got from that class. It was a good class, bottom line it talked about not giving up even if you feel you met a brick wall. People shared their longest search story. The speakers was twenty years because he was search the wrong county by 100 feet.

 

[abish19]

WHAT? A thread combining lovers of Disney with lovers of genealogy? This is my dream thread, everybody...

That seminar sounds fantastic. There is an upcoming seminar, similar to that, but hosted by a Family History Center two hours away from me (it's kind of a regional thing).

I'm fortunate in the genealogical department. I'm LDS, so much of my genealogy has already been researched, but as the first computer-literate person in my family who also cares about family history, it's fallen to me to get it organized and into PAF.

I also have a mother-in-law who is a professional genealogist. I'd be happy to solicit her (free!) services for anyone who has a specific need or question. I'm not saying she'd do your research for free but I'd be happy to ask her questions or advice.

Some of those classes sound really interesting!

Thanks for starting this thread...

 

[party of 3]

wow lisa that sounds really interesting.
thanks for sharing. i wish i had the time to start a project like this. i think sometimes you just have to bite the bullett and do it.
thanks again lisa.

 

[piratesmate]

wow lisa that sounds really interesting.
thanks for sharing. i wish i had the time to start a project like this. i think sometimes you just have to bite the bullett and do it.
thanks again lisa.

Do yourself a HUGE favor....take the time now to talk to the people who are still here who can help: parents, grandparents, great aunts & uncles - even elderly neighbors of family who love to chat. It doesn't need to be a huge time commitment. You can start by just asking them what they remember & write it down. The best thing, I've found, is to look at photos together & just let them reminisce if you can arrange it and if you can do it, use a tape recorder. Often little comments that don't seem worth writing down will provide clues at a later date!

You don't need to worry about working back to the 1700s when you start this. But those family stories you can obtain from grandparents, etc will really help your search in 10-20 yrs when you finally have time to really work on it. You know? I wish I could explain the difference in how hard it is to search for DH's family compared to my own. e.g. When looking through census records, I generally KNOW if a family with common names listed is mine because I know about where they lived & who the children/siblings were. But for DH, no one ever asked & I didn't "live" it. I didn't get dragged to his grandparents' house upstate once a month to have some kind of clue who lived or died when.

Just a thought...

 

[Lisa]

WHAT? A thread combining lovers of Disney with lovers of genealogy? This is my dream thread, everybody...

That seminar sounds fantastic. There is an upcoming seminar, similar to that, but hosted by a Family History Center two hours away from me (it's kind of a regional thing).

I'm fortunate in the genealogical department. I'm LDS, so much of my genealogy has already been researched, but as the first computer-literate person in my family who also cares about family history, it's fallen to me to get it organized and into PAF.

I also have a mother-in-law who is a professional genealogist. I'd be happy to solicit her (free!) services for anyone who has a specific need or question. I'm not saying she'd do your research for free but I'd be happy to ask her questions or advice.

Some of those classes sound really interesting!

Thanks for starting this thread...

The Family History Center in Franklin, MA is who put on the New England Family History Conference. If you can at all go to the one in your area, I would highly recommend it, and if you can post where and when it will be. If the conference is anything like the one we attended, it would be worth the two hour drive.

I am now inputting all my hardcopy into PAF, I love how you can attach documents and pictures to it!

Has your Mom been to Family History Library in SLC? I was there in December and got great information. I could easily see me going again if I could. When I was there the woman teaching the PAF class was related to my husband's family!

 

[Fran98765]

Sounds like a wonderful conference and thanks for sharing those links. Just a note, that the new LDS site is new.familysearch.org. There is a newfamilysearch.org but it is not operated by the church.

 

[PrincessNancy96]

OMG!!!

DD and I are getting her info into her 4H binders for her genealogy project... She and I have researched up to 255 people thus far (that is 8 generations direct line....that doesn't include the off shooting we do of researching cousins in the families..) There is NO way we can get this project done this weekend...but we can put a big dent into getting things labelled and ready to go...

Plus in reviewing the requirement for one of the divisions she can do this year being advanced.... she abstracted the information on one-line of our family...but now she has to go back and find the original census sheets and print those too.. which won't be hard since she abstracted all that info on her abstract sheet.. just adds to the list of things to do... Ok, off to put more dividers in....