IGHR Samford Day 4

The penultimate day of Course 6 was a smorgasbord. In the morning, Patricia Walls Stamm served up heaping portions of government documents tied to the settling and mapping of the US as it grew. Did you know that maps are an under-appreciated portion of the U.S. Serial Set? We learned the key to the secret code "ASP035-08 (24-1) Pub.land 1349, map 1."

After lunch, Ruth Ann Hager of the St. Louis County Public Library gave an exquisitely organized and timed presentation on four key resources for research in the Civil War era:
* states' slavery laws,  
* The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861-65),
* War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and
* Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion.

All have varying degrees of off-line and on-line availability. Key insight: these last three items have more to say about civilians and fugitive slaves than one might expect.

And after all that we had an hour and a half to do instructive "homework" on both phases. A major point of the whole day, if not the whole course, was to temper our genealogical inclination to search only for names.

With just the banquet and a half-day to go, it's time for class photos, preliminary farewells, and preliminary packing. Even Craig Scott's mobile bookstore is boxed back up.



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 4," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top Genealogists on the Web

Just in case you missed the memos, it's now easier than ever to get a good genealogical education while spending no money, or very little. Four good free sites to start, the first two just recently opened:

Elizabeth Shown Mills, Historic Pathways: a collection of published articles on difficult genealogical questions.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: excerpts and lessons from the classic reference on citation and evidence analysis (2nd edition), plus a store and discussion forums.

Craig Scott, Stump Craig (blog): Q&A Format, and yes, he has been stumped on occasion.

Board for the Certification of Genealogists, in particular the examples.

Feel free to discuss additions to this list in the comments.

Methodology Monday came on a Friday this week

I tend to assume that everybody reads Dick Eastman, and as a result I often forget to do so. That would be a mistake. There's plenty more to be said about internet searching, but what he relays from a recent FamilySearch conference call is plenty thought-provoking in itself.

This is one of the messages Elizabeth Shown Mills has been preaching for a while, and there are way plenty of genealogists (or as Craig Scott would have it, "people doing genealogy") who have not absorbed it yet.