Words from IGS Conference Day

Several admonitions are echoing in my mind from the Indiana Genealogical Society's day-long conference in Fort Wayne; other attendees' mileage may vary.

More than half of the 111 attendees also attended the business meeting, where we heard that our 76 volunteers had helped index 100% of Indiana's portion of the 1940 census in less than a month, far ahead of all neighboring states.

* Speaker Michael Hall, deputy chief genealogical officer of FamilySearch: “Every one of you should be writing in the FamilySearch Wiki [page about your county] about your libraries and resources,” thus helping draw genealogical tourism.

* Speaker Debra Mieszala, who works in the genealogical part of the process of identifying and returning remains of US soldiers long lost in action: The military now uses all three kinds of DNA -- Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA, so relatives of missing soldiers may have new opportunities to provide reference samples. Of the 88,000 missing, 78,000 are from WWII.

* IGS president Michael Maben, who asked for volunteers for an advocacy committee and identified the State Archives (long relegated to an outdated warehouse) as a problem to be addressed: “We need to press our legislature to replace that facility."

* Mieszala again (part of an informative talk on finding the patent filings of inventive ancestors): The Great Lakes Regional Branch of NARA has a Facebook page, and we should "friend" it. Among the many great examples they post from their holdings, one is a patent infringement case.

Lots of good people and good laughs, all in a day's genealogy work . . . the April 2013 conference in Bloomington will feature Josh Taylor.


Harold Henderson, “Words from IGS Conference Day,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]