Takeaways from Florida

I just tuned into a webinar hosted by the Florida State Genealogical Society. The purpose of this webinar was to promote the upcoming State Conference in Florida. What attracted me to this event was that two of my favourite presenters from the United States, Thomas MacEntee and Curt Witcher, were to be members of the webinar panel.


As this webinar was free I applied to take part and am most grateful to the  Florida State Genealogical Society  for allowing me to join the event. It was the first time I had joined a webinar that did not present a lecture or tutorial. In this webinar the four panellists panellists: Thomas, Curt, Ann Staley and Deanna Ramsey provided answers to questions posited through the chat facility of the webinar software. I asked and received answers to 2 questions that I posed and was pleased that the answers given supported some decisions I have recently made and advice I have recently given to a genealogy society.


Some of my takeaways from the webinar are:

• Curt suggested that a tablet is an essential tool for the 21st century genealogist.
• Thomas suggested that one must have a research log.
• Ann told us about a genealogy search engine liveroots.com.
• Thomas mentioned a search engine, Yippy, that provides cluster results.
• Someone suggested that people wishing to know about DNA should try to attend a webinar or course conducted by Thomas Shanker.
• Deana said that she is Facebook stalker who friends every distant cousin she can find on Facebook and religiously records in her family history software announcements of family events they post on Facebook.
• It was indicated that when he gets a brick wall Thomas takes the FAN approach and looks at Friends, Associates and Neighbours of the people he is hunting will stop.
• All presenters agreed that genealogy societies should have a social media presence. They indicated that a Facebook page and a blog were essential.
• Three of the four presenters use spreadsheets as organisational tools.

After the webinar formalities were concluded and I posted a thank you from downunder the organisers unmuted my mike and we had a few pleasant moments talking about how I found the webinar (social media) and what I thought of the panel approach. It was a great application of the webinar software. 

Once again I thank  Florida State Genealogical Society  for allowing me to join in. I only wish I could attend the conference in person but sadly I won't be in Florida again until April 2013.