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.

Pleased I took notice of the alarm this morning

When the alarm clock burst into song this morning I was sorely tempted to turn it off and roll over but I am a conscientious old girl who had a conference to attend.  After a good chat over breakfast with Louise St Denis I wandered over to the auditorium with Mr Luxegen to hear the 8:30 am keynote by Curt Witcher from The Allen County Public Library.


There are not enough superlatives to describe Curt's performance. I was once a librarian and was so proud to see a member of that profession give a provoking, polished and passionate presentation. So much of what Curt had to say resonated with me,  I have blogged before that I do genealogy for fun  - for me it is not an academic pursuit. Curt emphasized that a lot of people, like me, do genealogy for fun.

One of Curt's slides

 I typed madly during Curt's talk and will paste some of the notes I took into this post - they may not make a lot of sense out of context but perhaps they will.  Here goes

* These are the Best of times for genealogy.
* We all have a story to tell  - with technology we can tell it better and more often
* The power of telling our story can’t be over emphasized
*Digitized records can touch people where they live, they can be Touchstones to hold onto to help old people remember
* Digitisation makes things available forever and captures pieces of history
* Most technology use in The Allen County Public Library is in the genealogy center
* Technology allows us to move from spending resources finding things to spening reources on evaluating things to help us tell our stories
* Do you want to spend hours finding a document or ten minutes finding lots then hours evaluating what you have found?
* Web2.0 has changed the face of genealogy
* Wikis and crowd sourcing - wow
* Anyone can answer questions and contribute to FamilySearch wiki - some say "how dare prople mess with ym stuff?"
*  Research proves that the more often a page is edited the greater the accuracy
* Crowdsourcing can help us identify documents
* Libraries all over are digitising
* Making info more accessible - Family History Archive and Internet Archive
* Public domain ddigitising vs. inter library loan - How abt digital interlibrary loans?
* There are Millions of books available at your fingertips that you can search
* Wdytya is  inspiring people to do genealogy
* StoryCorps Newsletter tell your story archived searchable
*Rapid change in technology - Changes the face of genealogy
* If you are interested in more storytelling you will be so happy becaue you will have more at your fingertips
* Baby boomers are living a generation after retiring and reinventing themselves
* They have a deep concern in history and legacy they will expect technology in their family history life.
* People are connected all the time
* A lot of peeps in genie space hungry to use technology
* Societies don’t have web pages
The Face of Genealogy
* Sophisticated technology users expect to use technology for family history
* You don’t need an ancestor chart - you just need to know how you are looking for
* Genealogy is all about the experience - not about doing it right eg citations
* It’s about fun and success - it's a fact that people engage in things where they will have fun
Success  Enjoyment Experience

* Build our community together so we can develop new and better resources
* Living history is dying help us preserve it.
* Developers - let's have more mashups

Curt Wichler at The Family History Library

This evening I spoke with Curt at the function in the Family History Library and congratulated him on his talk. He kindly allowed me to take a snap of him - those that I had taken from the back row of the audience were a little fuzzy!