NGS Day Zero (Tuesday the 8th)

Cincinnati, National Genealogical Society --

Arriving at a conference is the best of times and the worst of times -- you don't know where ANYTHING is, but old friends pop up at random intervals. I knew I was in the right place when the registration clerk said, "The elevators are right over there by the brick wall."

FamilySearch held a blogger-appreciation-and-encouragement dinner, inviting bloggers to join their "Blog Ambassador" program for the 1940 census indexing project. We also learned that Chief Genealogy Officer David Rencher has started blogging, but it will be his observations, not official FamilySearch stuff. The food was local and excellent, although the "Chip Wheelies" would not fit well into a long-term low-calorie regimen.

Several of us had to leave (reluctantly) in the midst of Paul Nauta's presentation, but not before we learned that FS has 530 million images on line (37% from the US) and 1.7 billion indexed (63% from the US).

We whizzed down one flight of stairs to the Association of Professional Genealogists' roundtable on mentoring. (I was a panelist along with Stefani Evans, Jay Fonkert, and Claire Bettag; Craig Roberts moderated.) From the APG point of view, mentoring takes many forms, some of which we can facilitate more easily than others. Claire suggested that APG needs to emphasize that the mailing list, the webinars, the mentoring discussion sessions are all in fact forms of mentoring although they don't all bear the label. Craig reported his finding that when someone asked him to mentor them it rarely worked well, whereas when he took the initiative and offered to mentor someone else that worked better. It was also suggested that I put forth a book on the subject, but a later blog post will have to suffice for now.

As is usually the case with APG roundtables, the participants stuck around and talked afterwards. It was a good hour after the end of the formal program before the last three holdouts actually left the room, still talking (but you knew that) and realizing that tomorrow is another day filled with enough formal conference activities that Tuesday will seem like an oasis of tranquility.


Harold Henderson, "NGS Day Zero (Tuesday the 8th)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]