You can have any lecture format as long as it lasts an hour

The NGS conference in Las Vegas was a big success from my viewpoint as speaker and participant, and I anticipate great things from the upcoming FGS conference 21-24 August in Fort Wayne (yes, I am on the publicity committee). But they both could be better, and within the past few months I have heard almost the same sentiment from two genealogy leaders, a veteran and a new one, who to my knowledge are not acquainted: stop relying exclusively on the one-hour lecture format!

Tina Lyons is vice-president of the Indiana Genealogical Society and publicity chair for the aforementioned FGS, where she will also be speaking. She'd like to see some 20-minute sessions, perhaps modeled on the TED talks. She notes that her on-line Coursera classes come in 5- to 15-minute segments. And she may work an interactive game into her one-hour FGS talk.

Last Wednesday at NGS, Melinde Lutz Byrne -- who is, among other things, Fellow and President of the American Society of Genealogists, director of the Genealogical Research Program at Boston University's Center for Professional Studies, and co-editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly -- said that her talk that day (on advocacy and privacy) would be her last one-hour presentation. She gave similar reasons, and urged more panel discussions and workshops, as well as "poster sessions" like one she found worked well at the New England conference and lasted no more than 20 minutes, with everybody standing.

Just as many professional-development programs grew up outside of the umbrella of the Association of Professional Genealogists when it was slow to adapt, the major national and regional conferences might find themselves playing catch-up if they don't consider a more diverse format. Just sayin'.




Harold Henderson, "You can have any lecture format as long as it lasts an hour," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

NGS Day 3 Friday May 10

For logistical reasons only, Friday was my last real day at the conference. Please refer to other bloggers for Saturday!

My day began about 6 am in the nearly deserted free internet area (no problem with too many connections) and segued into the invitational FamilySearch breakfast (assigned tables and assigned places at each), where we learned that they add about 1.7 million new records per day, are desperately in search of Italian-speaking volunteer indexers, and are exploring ways to adapt facial-recognition software to word recognition as a way of indexing handwritten documents.

Dawne Slater-Putt's 8 am talk, "Fail! When the Record Is Wrong," was a boon to note-takers in that she spoke clearly and not too fast. Her bouquet of original records giving direct but erroneous evidence was striking. Takeaway: "Know your ancestor as a person so as not to be blinded by incorrect evidence."

I spent the rest of the morning in a New York intensive. NYGBR co-editor Karen Mauer Green emphasized the difficulties researchers from record-rich areas like New England and the Midwest will find in New York, where some record types are missing, and each of the 62 counties was to some extent a law unto itself. "Clerks essentially did what they want . . . plan to start over with each new county." A substantial aid in this process, the New York Family History Research Guide and Gazetteer, is forthcoming later this year.

NYGBR co-editor Laura DeGrazia gave a more upbeat perspective on the same situation, showing some of the records finds there to be made, such as town clerks' Civil War registers that can include time and place of birth and parents' names. I concluded that New York is the mother of innovative research techniques. And I have to say that if you must leave home for days to hang out in a desert filled with casinos in order to learn about genealogy, there is just no better place to be than in the front row of the hall, hearing DeGrazia and trading thoughts and wisecracks with Kimberly Powell and Michael Hait.

Melinda Henningfield and I chatted with visitors to the APG table in the exhibit area during the lunch hour, and then I retreated to become ready for my 4 pm talk on a Chicago-to-Ohio case study. The evening saw a meeting of mentors in preparation for the early June debut of small discussion groups on Tom Jones's popular new book Mastering Genealogical Proof, being organized by Angela McGhie.

And I know just from syllabus browsing that I had to miss great talks by Debbie Parker Wayne on DNA and Elizabeth Shown Mills on discoveries in the details.

It's now five years since my first NGS conference and I haven't even come close to regretting attending one yet. Don't miss it when it comes within your travel area.



Harold Henderson, "NGS Day 3 Friday May 10," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

NGS Day 2 Thursday May 9

Sometimes you can't both attend a conference and blog about it! Yesterday was that sort of day. For me it started with an internet session in the foyer area where sponsors have provided free wi-fi (when not too crowded), followed by the ProGen Study Group breakfast, which shared members and the buffet table with the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy breakfast. ProGen groups (18 months of study per each) are well up in double digits now, far enough so that even our mega-organizer Angela McGhie can't always recall who is from which group any more!

At 8 am, Greg Hise, UNLV history professor with a seemingly endless knowledge of Los Angeles, spoke on the ways in which it was "born global" and multicultural. If you had a question, he had a book title -- several book titles -- and author. At 9:30 Mara Fein spoke about LA area records. When seeking vital records there, "Avoid the state level." Such requests can take 18 months to turn around, and sometimes never. Go to the counties, and make sure you know when they were created, and in which years the city and county of Los Angeles created separate records.


At 11 am, I introduced friend and colleague Kimberly Powell, who provided a wealth of information -- not to tell us which genealogy program to buy, but how most efficiently to find out for ourselves which one(s) would best suit our styles. I like that approach and I think the audience did; anyway she was besieged with questions afterward. One takeaway: when dealing with on-line reviews, "Ignore the groupies and the haters" -- those who publish brief one-star or five-star reviews -- and concentrate on the longer ones that explain in some detail what they loved or hated.

(By the way, introducing speakers is one low-stress way of starting to find out whether you would like to get into actual speaking at conferences. No creativity or long-lasting vocal cords are required. Join the Genealogy Speakers Guild and get in on the action. Often there are more speakers than there are available introducers.)

Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, entertained the big crowd at the BCG luncheon with improbable tales of ancestral idiocies as they have appeared in court records from colonial times to the 20th century. Sorry, I was too busy laughing to take notes.

I took lots of notes during Elizabeth Shown Mills's 2:30 talk: "Information Overload? Effective Project Planning, Research, Data Management & Analysis." If you have ever collected a difficult ancestor's 20 census neighbors on each side and then wondered what to do with them, this is a talk you must hear. The audio should be a reasonable substitute if you just can't be there.

Finally, at 4 pm I introduced friend and colleague Jane Wilcox, who gave an unusually fast-paced and visual talk about what she found out about many of her female forebears -- a deft presentation that kept introduction and conclusion to an absolute minimum, and eschewed words on screen. Maybe I could learn something there!

The rest of the day was full of good discussion that went on into the night, and which I was not the last to leave. I know people who attend conferences simply for the purpose of joining in these meetings, formal and informal, and I can see why. These folks are worth spending time with, even if I have to come to a casino to do so.




Harold Henderson, "NGS Day 2 Thursday May 9," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

NGS Day 1 Wednesday May 8

Las Vegas is an improbable (and noisy) part of the universe. The day started with one of those serendipitous encounters that make conferences such fun -- a friend and I got on the elevator simultaneously around 6 am and we made a run for affordable edibles to help us last out the week.

Marian Smith told a great story of her quest for the origins of the 1931 Morton Allan steamship arrival directory. "Some projects take years," she said, "Be prepared to be surprised." We were. "When you see a piece that might fit but are not sure, you've got to pick it up."

Tom Jones was stellar in the 11 am slot on "Debunking Misleading Records." He described alphabetizing records (that were originally chronological) as a form of error, because it strips out contextual information that might be used to correct an error. And he advised us that using genealogy programs can cause us to miss a "huge piece of genealogical reasoning," the piece that takes place when you're writing out your proof. He even finished two minutes before time.

I'll let others comment on my APG luncheon talk on advocacy and how to think about it. (Shortest possile version: Don't overlook the regulation-writing process that inevitably follows legislation.) A version of it will be available for the new APG Quarterly editor, Christy Fillerup, to use as needed.

Melinde Lutz Byrne spoke on advocacy for record access. By accumulation of well-known facts, she showed that birth, marriage, and death records are not in fact private -- directly undercutting some lawmakers' arguments to try to make them otherwise. Meanwhile I hear that Kimberly Powell encouraged a lot of folks to use and learn Scrivener.

Lots of interesting conversation at the exhibit hall BCG table late in the day about how many certificants "overachieve," as in producing kinship determination projects 70 or more pages long. Don't be intimidated. Length is not a genealogical standard.



Harold Henderson, "NGS Day 1 Wednesday May 8," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Objectors to war have descendants, too

Cindy Freed at the group blog In-Depth Genealogist calls attention to a Civil War database of Pennsylvanians whose religious convictions prevented them from accepting a draft to serve in the Union army. Her title ("Bet You've Never Researched This") may grate on those with lots of Quaker ancestors, or those from the German Brethren churches who took a similar stand. But her title does reflect an ambivalence in genealogy between honoring individual service and sacrifice in war, on one hand, and support of war in general, on the other. (An earlier post along these lines is here.)

Additional sources for more recent conscientious objectors can be found in National Archives Record Group 163, "Selective Service System (World War I), 1917-1939," and Record Group 147, "Records of the Selective Service System 1940-," and in various federal court records.





Cindy Freed, "Bet You've Never Researched This," The In-Depth Genealogist, posted 6 May 2012 (http://www.theindepthgenealogist.com/?p=6448 : accessed 6 May 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Objectors to war have descendants, too," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Milton maintains his mystery

Last year I wrote all around the subject of Milton Reynolds, documented resident of Jefferson County, Indiana, in 1850, but not found since, in the Indiana Genealogist. Since the article won the Elaine Spires Smith writing award at the 2013 Indiana Genealogical Society conference last week, I get one more chance to pass on the message to anyone who might catch sight of a hint of him: HELP!

I called this article "the world's longest query" because a close look at the main Reynolds families in the county didn't find a definite place for him. Previous blog post here, or you can find the article in the members-only section of the IGS web site.





Harold Henderson, "Milton maintains his mystery," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Harold Henderson, "The Mystery of Milton Reynolds in Jefferson County," Indiana Genealogist vol. 23, no. 4 (December 2012):5-32; http://www.indgensoc.org/membersonly/igs/quarterly/index.php : accessed 23 December 2012.

Finding parents and grandparents despite multiple missing records

The landscape of eighteenth-century Maryland is littered with tax, property, probate, and vital records that aren't there. Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean. My friend and colleague Michael Hait has taken these genealogical lemons and made them into an astonishing amount of lemonade in a sixteen-page tour de force in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

He starts with three records for Thomas Burgan, born in the 1740s. From there he distinguishes two men from two different localities, and goes on to identify both parents and all four grandparents for the man associated with "Dear Bit" and "Black River Hundred," even though direct evidence is sparse and the indirect evidence is constantly interrupted by the static of missing deeds, missing probates, missing tax records, and mislabeled records.

The basic principles are not complicated -- most notably, follow the land even when inadequately described -- but in this records environment the application of them is intricate. Separate arrays of indirect evidence support this Thomas's descent from Philip the father, Rebecca Green the mother, and them as a couple.

William Litchman recommends reading studies of this kind four times for best understanding. Anyone who claims to understand this article after only one or two readings is either a liar or a prodigy.




Michael Hait, "Parents for Thomas Burgan of Baltimore County, Maryland," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (March 2013): 19-33.


Harold Henderson, "Finding parents and grandparents despite multiple missing records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]