FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)

The South Carolina backcountry could be the US headquarters of brick walls, so it behooves dedicated researchers to pay attention when Elizabeth Shown Mills devotes an entire lecture to the region, as she did Saturday, the final morning of FGS 2012 in Birmingham. It doesn't matter whether you have, or ever expect to have, research targets there. To paraphrase an old song about a big city, "If you can solve it there, you can solve it anywhere." My only problem with the talk was that not everyone at the conference was there to hear it.

Squeezed in around the lecture I enjoyed a pleasant breakfast with fellow APG board members Joan Peake and Kimberly Powell, picked up a 75%-off book at the Genealogical.com booth, and got to the Birmingham airport before midday, leaving plenty of time to chat with the selection of early-departing genealogists in Concourse C. (Speaking of vendor booths, earlier in the conference I was pleased to meet up with a new and very promising hybrid that could be the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross an antique dealer with a genealogist?" -- to be blogged about in the near future.)

By leaving midday Saturday, I missed another very interesting-looking talk about exceedingly obscure federal pension records by Kenneth W. Heger, on NARA Record Group 48 (Records of the Department of the Interior) including pension commissioners' reports on appeals and correspondence.

Thanks to all the volunteer workers who made this conference possible. I'm looking forward to next year's edition in the Midwestern research mecca of Fort Wayne, Indiana!


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Three (Friday August 31)

When I attended my first national conference (NGS in Kansas City 2008) I knew only one or two of the many hundreds of people present. I had no meetings or other events to attend beyond the scheduled presentations. Basically everything I knew about the entire event was public. I could have blogged in some detail about every day (don't think I did).

Now at FGS Birmingham 2012, I know a lot more people, I have a lot more fun with friends from across the country. I also attend a more meetings and fewer lectures, and much of what I learn is not public, or if public not terribly interesting. I missed out on Mark Lowe's talk on Baptist missionaries due to an arduous meeting; while on what you might call courier duty, I heard the last ten minutes of Tom Jones's new talk on citations. (If you're kind of stuck on the subject, check it out and see if his approach helps.)

I love talking to the folks who come by the Association of Professional Genealogists and the Board for the Certification of Genealogists booths about their interests or research issues, but it's hard to explain them all. An Indiana friend and I compared notes on a favorite central-Indiana courthouse where the old records are on the skylit fourth floor instead of the usual dank basement and which is ground zero for a pesky ancestral problem. I could tell all about how APG is continuing a dynamic but difficult phase of growth, but that would only be interesting to those members who are benefiting from our new webinars and other features. I heard Mary Penner's hilarious APG luncheon talk on ten reasons not to write your family history, but -- well, you had to be there.

As a result, it's hard for me to say a lot about FGS this time around. And it has become easier for me to understand how some folks attend the event, stay in the hotel, hang in the restaurants and exhibit hall, spend all day talking to people on business, and never actually enroll in the conference itself. They are just as concerned with genealogy as ever, but their conference lives have been turned inside out, and what was once the core has almost disappeared.


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Three (Friday August 31)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Two (Thursday August 30)

High points of the day:

Waking up late on a day when I didn't have any early-morning commitments.

Talking with people about BCG certification at the booth.

Hearing Warren Bittner's awesome historical AND genealogical talk on illegitimacy in Germany in the 1810s and 1820s (AKA "Bittner's Bavarian Bastards"), in which his paternal-line ancestor was denied the right to marry for a decade, essentially because he was poor. No wonder American looked good.

What with committee work and other commitments, I don't get to attend all the lectures I would like, but this one was almost worth the price of admission by itself.


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Two (Thursday August 30)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day One (Wednesday August 29)

A many-faceted day in which I attended Jay Fonkert's stellar talk on local society newsletters and journals. One radical lesson: don't publish because "we've always done it." Figure out if your publications fit your society's goals.

I learned that there is no air-conditioning in the exhibit hall during setup, but somehow managed to help set up the BCG booth anyway.

Michael Hait and I practiced our two-man talk (or is it a comedy routine?) on how NOT to get certified.

I learned that downtown Birmingham isn't terribly friendly to pedestrians, but nevertheless took two walks there for lunch and dinner. You'd never know from the weather here that New Orleans is drowning.



Harold Henderson, "FGS Day One (Wednesday August 29)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save The Records!

If you sit down at a table near the Federation of Genealogical Societies registration booth in the Birmingham convention center, eventually everyone in the (genealogy) world will come by. In the course of the day I learned about certain early Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, probate records that are stored inaccessibly somewhere in "the mines" (presumably old coal mines), and about lumber companies in Mississippi tearing up whole cemeteries without a peep from cowed legislators.

Which pretty well set the stage for the Association of Professional Genealogists' usual Tuesday-night pre-conference roundtable on access to records and the "art of advocacy." Organized by Diane Gravel (New England) and chaired by Thomas MacEntee (Illinois), four knowledgeable panelists discussed how genealogists can deal with rampant misinformation about open records and then go on to advocate for:
(1) the preservation of records,
(2) open access to them, and
(3) adequate funding for the repositories that manage and maintain them.

Panelists were Alvie Davidson, CG (sm) (Florida), Teri Flack (Texas), Polly Kimmitt, CG (sm) (Massachusetts) and Kelvin L. Meyers (Texas).

The panelists took turns answering pre-set questions from the chair. Teri added a note of cheer in telling the tale of a Texas Court Records Task Force that led to a great improvement in record preservation and openness in the state (not spearheaded by genealogists but by judges, if I remember right). The panelists agreed that in the year 2017 genealogists will still be fighting over these three records issues -- and if we aren't, the results will be not be good. APG will be doing more work along these lines -- meaning ultimately that its members will be.

And in doing so we'll need to make friends and alliances with other groups that have similar interests, and find ways to dramatize their importance. Librarians have "Banned Books Week." What could we do to put "No Records Week" in the headlines? A visual representation of the 55 million Texas records unprocessed and unidentified for lack of funding? A story of a family of siblings reunited because Illinois recently opened its adoption records? Your idea here . . .



Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save the Records!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]