Attention All Midwesterners from New York

Many of our Midwestern ancestors came from, or through, New York state. In the fall 2011 issue of the New York Researcher, co-editors Laura Murphy DeGrazia, CG, and Karen Mauer Green, CG, of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record invite article submissions for the nation's second-oldest genealogical journal:

You need not be an experienced writer to submit your manuscript for consideration. If your work contains the basic building blocks -- thorough research, precise documentation, sound methodology, and carefully formulated arguments -- the editorial team will help you develop the material. . . . Not every submission is accepted for publication, of course, but articles are never returned without some suggestions for improvement.

New York research offers (how shall I say this?) unique challenges. There is no better way to find out how solid your research is than to write it up and get feedback from knowledgeable people.

And how better to memorialize your New York family than to publish its story in a prestigious, lasting, and easily located form? More details at the above link.

Live at NGS Charleston: Day 2

[During Blogger's lengthy outage this was first posted on Facebook.]

One of the best and least communicable things about a conference is meeting old friends and making new ones, starting with the folks chowing down on the free breakfast at my out-of-the-way motel. We recognized each other from the new FamilySearch t-shirts.

Living legend Helen Leary spoke on the early (1790-1840) censuses and demonstrated how to wring the maximum information out of them, spiking the instruction with deadpan humor. After showing how one can often estimate many things from ultra-minimal 1790 census, she made an interesting distinction between evidence for proof and evidence for use: "We know that 'close enough' in genealogy is not close enough, but this estimate will help you look for the record you want to look for."

Elizabeth Shown Mills packed several decades of real problems into an unreal will and deed, and took the audience through them line by line. "No skill is as important to a genealogist than the ability to analyze a document."

Laura Murphy de Grazia gave a stunning example of the kind of mistake you can make if you stop researching too soon, in the course of explaining as much as can be explained of the requirement that a genealogical proof include (among other things) a "reasonably exhaustive search."

Engineer Tim Cross of FamilySearch thought out loud with his audience about what is about to happen as cloud computing, mobile applications, geospatial computing, and social media converge -- and genealogical information begins to flow as easily and uniformly as electricity, regardless of its web site of origin. The audience was not entirely on board -- "You don't know if they're right." He surmised that ultimately in the genealogy cloud, there would be both fluid collaborative information changing with new contributions, and a well-document "historic" portion that would remain stable. "It's important to know what's right and can be audited," i.e. the path of evidence and reasoning to conclusion can be followed, "and to know what's false and why. We're still figuring that out." It does sound like documentation and good research practices will continue to be indispensable in the forthcoming faster, mobile-app-intensive, crowd-sourced, geotagged, and Google-Goggled world.

Methodology Monday with reasonably exhaustive search

Good genealogy requires that we do "reasonably exhaustive" or "reasonably extensive" research, which according to Board for the Certification of Genealogists Standard 19 includes "appropriately broadening the search beyond the person, family, event, or record of most-direct impact on the project," and looking for possibly conflicting information.

Naturally newcomers and learners want more specifics, and there are plenty in Laura Murphy DeGrazia's article on the subject in the October-December NGS Magazine. (She is a Certified Genealogist and president of BCG.) She has a very nice paragraph on this exact point, from which I'll quote only the last sentence: "To meet BCG standards, every search must be extensive enough that a highly experienced researcher would consider it reasonably exhaustive, regardless of the level of experience of the person who conducted the research."