FGS - Haphazard posts from this week's classes

It is Saturday, September 10^th, 2011 and we are on our last day of the FGS conference. I am able to write because it is 8:30 in the morning and I am taking a break from classes because I did not find anything I wanted to attend. Nothing bothers me more than sitting through a boring class. I had one of those yesterday. It was just awful. All it takes is one of those to really burn you. Actually, I woke up on the 2^nd day sick as a dog with a cold. Guess I haven’t been taking enough vitamins. So I’m struggling to keep up with my classes. This is why I haven’t been blogging much. Or taking many pictures of the events I’ve attended.

Yesterday (Friday), we shared a table at breakfast with Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings and his wife Linda. Our hotel (The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Hotel) is undergoing some renovations (still) and was not ready to sustain a huge influx of conference goers and then a busload of bikers that came in the night after. So they asked us to consolidate our tables and being social genealogists that we are, we agreed to let complete strangers share tables with us. Of course, in our case, Randy and his wife were not complete strangers.

Randy asked what about the conference had surprised us most but I didn’t really have an answer. Although this was my first FGS conference, it was my 2^nd National conference – I had just attended my first National conference, NGS, in May, so there were a lot of similarities between the two. I did think there were a lot more advanced genealogists at this conference.

We didn’t get any sight-seeing done on Friday because it was raining. I got in a full day of classes though, starting with Joshua Taylor’s talk on Digital Preservation. He talked librarian speak which was very cool and I was surprised he didn’t lose the audience at “metadata – data about data.” I was able to follow along just fine because I am, after all, a fellow librarian. We met a fellow gen society manager from PA in this class as well. It was nice to put a face to a name.

My next class was about Researching your Pioneer Ancestors by James Hansen from the Wisconsin Historical Society. He talked about the Land Records and the Case Files that you can get from the National Archives in addition to the Land Patents that are online. He also reiterated my belief that you would always look at the original records. Lastly, he said you should remember to search records in the lands in between migrations.

Well I’m off to my next class, so I will close for now and write more later.