Weekend Wonderings: Taking Notes

This past week there was a bit of discussion on the Transitional Genealogists Forum about note-taking, especially at conference lectures. Do you take notes at all? With pen and paper? On a laptop or tablet or phone?

Does other peoples' electronic note-taking bother you, either as a listener or as a speaker?

I find myself splitting the difference. Sometimes I take notes the old-fashioned way, but they are often illegible. Sometimes I'm the guy at the side of the room using one of the very few electric sockets. Either way, I need to find a way to reunite the notes with the syllabus, and a way to locate them both again when that topic arises in my work and I need to double-check the six crucial steps in tracking down a War of 1812 veteran!



Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: Taking Notes," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Unsolicited advice for national conference and institute recidivists

There is no sixth day of Samford but it's still making me think.

Many sets of advice exist for first-time attendees of national conferences or institutes, regularly and appropriately repeated. In the post-Samford recovery period, it occurs to me that there's not much advice for those who come back for seconds, and thirds, and -- well, you know. My list is short:

(1) Realize that you are likely to accumulate a whole new set of wonderful friends. I'm not sure that that's any serious/transitional/professional genealogist's goal. (We do tend to be less likely than average to be social butterflies, given the solitary nature of much of our work.) But it happens.

(2) Realize that you will become overcommitted.

What follows from these two is that we soon find ourselves in need of establishing our goals, planning accordingly, and keeping track of conversations had and promises made more or less casually in the course of a meal, or a day. (Samford is not heaven -- we still have to work, and besides, there are snakes.) Asking folks to remind us with an email is a good strategy too, but what if they forget?

I don't care if we keep track 20th-century style with notes or some later way. But if we get in the habit before we have to -- like learning to cite sources when we know perfectly well what and where they are -- then we'll have it when we really need it.

Feel free to add less obvious suggestions in the comments!



Harold Henderson, "Unsolicited advice for national conference and institute recidivists," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]