Back to the future in a self-driving car

Nobody knows what genealogy will be like in 2117. But three weeks from today, at the BCG luncheon at FGS Pittsburgh, you can hear some things I think might happen. It's not all good news but some of it could be funny.

Benjamin Franklin supposedly asked to be waked up every 100 years to be told what was going on. Is he just as glad we didn't?

The 200-Year-Old Genealogist

Everyone who's even thinking of going to the Federation of Genealogical Societies' national conference in Fort Wayne in August (or who's thinking of signing up before July 1 to get the early-bird discount) should already be reading both the FGS conference blog and the blog of the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library, one of the two local hosts. In just the past few days I've learned:

* how the center's unique adaptation of the Dewey Decimal System works, so that you won't miss anything in searching the printed materials, and

* that the librarians on staff there have among them more than 200 years' worth of genealogy experience.

My free 26-page guide to the center, Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne, doesn't include either of these fun facts -- yet -- but it can still help you make the most of your limited time there.




Harold Henderson, "The 200-Year-Old Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Three Talks at FGS 2013

I will be giving three talks at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Fort Wayne next August (just a little more than nine months from now):

Thursday, August 22, 5pm, "First Steps in Indiana Research," from Indiana's Big Four to some archives and county-level resources.

Friday, August 23, 2pm, "Beyond Fort Wayne, Madison, and the Newberry: Lesser-Known Midwestern Archives," a personal selection of useful archives I have known in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Saturday, August 24, 8 am, "Three Ways to Improve Your Speaking Ideas," sponsored by the Genealogical Speakers Guild with some ideas applicable even to those who don't lecture.

If none of these tickle your fancy, FGS has plenty more to offer, and the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center as a jumbo-sized research bonus.




Harold Henderson, "Three Talks at FGS  2013," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Chicago Research En Route to FGS 2013

Besides containing one of the premier genealogy libraries -- the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center -- and hosting next year's Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, Fort Wayne is also surrounded in every direction by other useful repositories. The following (by me) was just posted on the FGS 2013 conference blog, first in a series of short posts on ways to pack in extra research on your way to or from the conference in Fort Wayne.

* Chicago, the de facto capital of the Midwest, a little over three hours west of Fort Wayne, has ample entertaining destinations for any non-genealogists in your group. Travelers can consider parking at an edge location (such as O'Hare or Midway airports) and taking transit into one or more repositories.

* The Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, http://www.newberry.org. Mammoth historical collections, national and international in scope, with very knowledgeable genealogy and local history librarians. Quality in-house bookstore. If you can only visit one location, this is the one.

* National Archives at Chicago, 7358 South Pulaski Road, http://www.archives.gov/chicago. Federal records for six states, both microfilm and physical archives. Call ahead.

* Chicago Public Library, 400 S. State (Harold Washington Library Center), http://www.chipublib.org. A public library with significant genealogy and local history holdings. Note special and neighborhood collections at Woodson Regional, 9325 S. Halsted, http://www.chipublib.org/branch/details/library/woodson-regional, and Sulzer Regional, 4455 N. Lincoln, http://www.chipublib.org/branch/details/library/sulzer-regional.

* Chicago Historical Museum, 1601 N. Clark, http://www.chicagohistory.org/research. Entry fee. The ultimate for specifically Chicago research – old phone books, newspapers, manuscripts. Note that the research center has shorter hours than the museum.



Harold Henderson, "Chicago Research En Route to FGS 2013," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Updated list of presentations

I've uploaded my latest brochure of presentations (known as "lectures" to those of us of a certain age) over at Midwest Roots. Paper copies (again for those of us of a certain age) will be available at the Genealogical Speakers Guild table at FGS conference in Birmingham, Alabama, this coming week. Mainly I'm about records, research, writing, and education, but with a twist. I'm also about the proof argument from hell, spiral staircases, and the genealogy police.



Harold Henderson, "Updated list of presentations," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

passing along Midwestern topics for FGS

Even though I just registered to attend it, I've been delinquent in mentioning that we have a national genealogy conference coming to the Midwest -- the Federation of Genealogical Societies in Springfield, Sangamon County, Illinois, September 7-10. Now Paula Stuart-Warren has given me a prompt in her conference news blog, listing the fifteen presentations with Midwestern content!

An outsider's critical view of genealogy

My old friend and former colleague Jim Krohe holds forth on a regular basis at Illinois Times in Springfield (soon to be host of the annual Federation of Genealogical Societies meeting in September). Last month his column had some provocative words and thoughts on genealogy as currently practiced. They aren't mine, but sometimes it's instructive to learn what an outsider sees when he takes a look:

Most family “histories” aren’t, having very little history in them. They are genealogies, family trees that focus (often obsessively) on the who and the when, not the where the why and the how. . . . At best, genealogies are to the family history what the road map is to the Michelin guide. Genuine family histories – that is, an objective rendering of facts, scrupulously verified and placed in the context of broader social and economic realities of respective eras – are rare.

Read the whole thing at the above link.

Partial Saturday in Little Rock -- sign a petition for the Library of Michigan!

I had to leave early on the last day of the FGS conference, but did pick up a few thoughts:

* Got an ancestor in the 1830 census and no idea where he or she lived, because the county wasn't yet divided into townships? As part of the discussion of her "sure-fire never-fail" "5-P test for proving identity," Elizabeth Shown Mills gave a whirlwind demonstration of how to use census neighbors' landholdings to track the path of the census taker and thus locate individuals who hadn't purchased land.

* Paula Stuart Warren went through at least 20 different kinds of school records (I lost count) and almost as many different places to find them.

* Richard Sayre gave the nuts and bolts of topographic maps and the relevant coordinate systems. This seems to have been map day, because he too wound up showing how to correlate a variety of maps to find the exact present-day location of an ancestral farm, using online sources.

I was especially disappointed to miss Tom Jones on "Solving Problems with Original Sources," including such rarely consulted sources as Revolutionary War pension final payment vouchers, Federal district court papers, and "loose" probate papers (that is, the evidence and forms filed in the case, as opposed to the matter copied and preserved in will and probate record books). Fortunately, this session, like most, was to be recorded on CD by Jamb Tapes, Inc. of St. Louis and hopefully will soon be available via their web site. Their people had a several-times-daily aerobic workout coordinating the recording of speakers at far opposite ends of the Peabody Hotel and Statehouse Convention Center complex.

State-level news: Illinois has started planning for hosting the 2011 FGS in Springfield. And the joint FGS-NGS Records Preservation and Access Committee has started an on-line petition to save the Library of Michigan. The legislature can still reject the governor's ill-advised executive order that would disperse the library's collections; so far only one house has acted.

Friday in Little Rock

Not entirely random tidbits from the September 4 sessions at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference:

* Richard Sayre on different indexes to the United States Serial Set: on Lexis/Nexis he gets 2,189 hits on "Sayre." On HeritageQuest, he gets 93. The nicest thing he could say about that discrepancy was, "There's a big filter there."

* Elizabeth Shown Mills on finding evidence of parentage in a deposition made 115 years after the child was born: "Do you carry your research down that far?"

* At the Association of Professional Genealogists' 30th anniversary luncheon, Desmond Walls Allen read extensive excerpts from her copy of the June 2030 APG Quarterly. I look forward to obtaining the confirmatory evidence 21 years from now.

* Beverly Rice on diaries and letters: "Too many people read them once, and don't read them [or transcribe them] again."

* Barbara Vines Little found the only evidence for the father of an illegitimate child in -- Baptist church minutes, where the relevant couple was "dismissed from the church for violating the seventh commandment."

Thursday in Little Rock

Not necessarily representative tidbits from my day at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Arkansas' cap city:

* At the opening ceremonies: Jim Hastings of the National Archives, discussing the rationale for their many partnerships in digitizing records: "Our goal is to make our information available to people who don't know we exist."

* Elizabeth Shown Mills' 7th principle for jump-starting your research: "Accept reality. Don't demand a smoking gun."

* Tom Jones: "Any source can err. Therefore, genealogical proof results only from a reasoning process, not from any record." BTW, he's still looking in the peer-reviewed genealogical literature for any example of a case in which (1) no source specifies X's parentage (or when a source specifies it wrongly), and (2) a source states that Y is not the ancestor of X, and (3) it is finally proved that Y is. This may seem like an unusual quest, and it is, but I can't explain it without recapitulating the most challenging theoretical genealogical lecture I've ever heard.

* Marie Varrelman Melchiori on military records in the National Archives: Anyone who served through 1855 could have Unindexed Bounty Land, regardless of whether they had a pension. Check it out.

* Tim Pinnick: you will not believe what hard-core genealogy information you can find in Congressional hearings. Start with the 42-volume index in most university libraries.

Is Arkansas in the Midwest?

Not hardly, but that's where I'll be this week so the blog will look a little different. At least I get to drive the full length of Illinois, Chicago to Cairo (is this a reward or a punishment?!), and hopefully bring you a different kind of blog take on the Association of Professional Genealogists gatherings (late Tuesday and Wednesday) and then the Federation of Genealogical Societies (Thursday-Saturday), all in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas -- more the mid-South than the Midwest in my regional book.