FGS - Focus on Societies - Day 1

The first day of the conference was a success and fun was had by all. I attended David Rencher’s opening session about how to keep societies from extinction. He pointed out the following:

In order to understand why societies go out of existence, we must first understand why they exist in the first place.

Historically speaking, Rencher reminded us, genealogical societies were formed around a bunch of genealogy people who got together to talk about genealogy; these meetings often centered around potlucks.  People got together because they enjoyed the social experience. This has become much more difficult to maintain with the advent of the internet which increased access to records and material to people who no longer had to leave their homes.

In order to sustain a society, one has to evaluate the costs involved of each service provided and then identify ways in which to reduce those costs in order to reach a goal of a $0 membership. Remember why and how they got together in the first place? Additionally, the society’s mission statement must keep up with the changing landscape, including the technological changes.

The whole day was dedicated to the Focus on Societies sessions.  I attended two morning sessions, then we took a break to visit the Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library, and then I attended one more society meeting before ending the day.

The two morning sessions I attended were about copyright issues and internet collaborative tools you can use for outreach and education.  Most of the copyright information wasn’t new to me. However, I wish there was a webinar about it that I could play for my members and newsletter and journal editors so they will be informed, especially about sharing information with each other, whether it be a cool blog post you read about a new software tool or some genealogy you read out of a book that you would like to incorporate into your own family tree. A good point was made that as a society board member or editor, by following the copyright rules, we are providing good examples to our members/readers. It has been difficult for me to teach my newsletter editors the importance of obtaining permission and/or attributing the work to someone else. 

The final session I attended with Paula Stuart Warren was about creating a Society Handbook or Operating Manual of sorts. This is what I am trying to build in my genealogy society right now. I have requested that each committee submit a document about what they do, how they do it, and/or what they would like to see done or any improvements they would like to see implemented, especially if there were more volunteers. This session was good because we broke into groups and outlined what we would do if we held a particular board or committee position.

We didn’t attend the Old Fashioned Prairie Social because the description said it only had desserts and we were short one ticket. So we walked a block down to the Italian place to have dinner instead. Back in the hotel room by 7:30 to write this blog post and relax. I am hoping to get some photos of the museum uploaded as well and a blog post written about that. Tomorrow we are attending a breakfast panel hosted by Jonathan Good from 1000memories.com with Dear Myrtle and Josh Taylor. They will be speaking about how to engage the younger generation in genealogy by using various digital tools. Check out their website today! http://1000memories.com. 

Local Gen Society Mentioned all the Way out in Burbank!

Last weekend several members of my local genealogical society, Durham-Orange Genealogical Society (D-OGS) met in the small conference room of the Chapel Hill Library to watch live streaming videos of some of the presentations that were broadcast from the Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in Burbank, California!

I brought in some sweet tea, lemonade, cheese and crackers and homemade cookies for snacks! I hooked up my laptop to the projector that was provided by the nice library staff and started up the live stream of video and audio projecting on the somewhat smaller than usual, but workable, screen.

Photo of my laptop, projector and projector screen. The audio from the presentation came from my laptop. Had there been more people, I probably would have needed an additional set of speakers hooked up to my laptop. I will remember this for next time. Photo by Ginger R. Smith, 11 June 2011

Photo of Lisa Louise Cooke from the Genealogy Gems Podcast. Photo from the SCGS Jamboree Page

The first live broadcast started promptly at 11:30 am with Lisa Louise Cooke talking about “Google Search Strategies for Genealogists.” If you were watching this video at home, you might have heard Mrs. Cooke give us a shoutout – she mentioned that there was a genealogy society in North Carolina meeting at the local library to watch some live streaming video presentations together! Talk about getting the word out there! All the way from Burbank California! We all waved back to her on the video screen and I was just tickled pink!

I don’t know about all of you, but I thought I knew everything there was to know about performing Google searches. Boy was I wrong! Did you know you could put dates in your searches? Just type in Ginger Smith 1990…2011 and the search results will come up with my name and then it will bold all of the years mentioned in this time frame?

And did you know there was a synonym search using the ~ ?

What about the *? You can use this between two words in your search to catch phrases that might have an additional term between them.

Another feature that I found interesting was the use of the related tool. If you find a website that you like and you want to find other pages just like it, you can type in your search related:http://www.webaddress.com to find other pages just like it. This can be useful for finding those family pages.

These are just some of the things I learned in Mrs. Cooke’s class. I wasn’t the only one who took several NEW things away from this class!

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Photo of Curt Witcher, Senior Manager for Special Collections at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, IN. Photo from the SCGS Jamboree Page

The next video we watched was by the Allen County Library Director, Curt Witcher, who was to talk about “Using Ancestral Origins As a Genealogical Research Key.” We had several technical difficulties with this video, as did the several hundred other people who tuned in to watch. Luckily the people at home also had access to a live chat room, so we were able to share in the experiences of the technical difficulties. We used this time to discuss some of the “business” of our society and our website. We have formed a great partnership with a local guy named Allen Dew who has created an outstanding website cataloging the local cemeteries in North Carolina and Virginia. On his website, cemeterycensus.org, he has links to each NC county, with each cemetery listed and transcripts posted along with photos and links to google maps and directions on how to find the cemeteries.

Not all counties are complete at this time, but the counties of Durham and Orange, and the present day counties of Chatham, Caswell, Randolph, and Wake that were originally part of Olde Orange County are already populated with over hundreds of cemetery listings.

Allen also has links and helpful hints about how to inventory, photograph, and upload information about cemeteries you run across and would like to make available on the website.

And because we have a cool little partnership going on with him now, he added this nifty little banner with a link to our society’s website:

Check it out! Cemeterycensus.org.

OH, and back to the Curt Witcher video, he talked a lot about determining the ethnicity of your ancestors and then learning all you can about that particular ethnic group in that part of the country in which they lived. He recommended that you seek out ethnic-specific newspapers and journals.

He also emphasized that our ancestors stuck together in their tight little ethnic groups: they emmigrated together, they settled together and they migrated together, so if you cannot find your ancestor, look for their neighbors or other members of their close ethnic group. Also, if you are having trouble identifying your ancestor’s ethnic group, look at their religion for clues. They too will have records.

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 Photo of D-OGS members Ginger, Holt and Carol watching David Lambert’s video on Finding your Union Civil War Ancestor. Photo by Ginger R. Smith, 11 June 2011

My faithful society members and I stuck around for the 3^rd video in the series which was by David Lambert who spoke about “Researching Your Union Civil War Ancestors.”

We talked a LOT during this presentation about the various records David displayed on the screen and exchanged stories about what we had found – or not found - on our own ancestors.

A good time was definitely had by all. I wrote this post to illustrate what you can do even as a little genealogical society. This didn’t take much to prepare – all I had to do was call the library to book the room and request a projector and screen, announce to the society members and cross post to other society newslists, and then wait for them to show up! I probably would have had more people show up if it weren’t summertime and if I had had more advanced notice about this event. I found out about the live streaming of these videos being offered on Monday, waited two days to hear back from the library and announced on Wednesday for this meeting on Saturday.

The free live streaming of these presentations were made available by the Southern California Genealogical Society and RootsMagic. Thank you! 

Local Genealogy Society using Technology to reach out to Non-Local Members

The first quarter of 2011 is almost upon us and I wanted to highlight what my local genealogy group has been doing in order to keep up with all of the available advancing technology tools out there today in order to reach our ever growing non-local membership base.

One of our first goals is to reach out to our non-local members more.  In order to do this, we are trying to make our monthly meeting presentations available online for people to view from their homes or local libraries.  We are all pretty new to this, so we thought we would start small.

One of our members used her Kodak PlaySport to video our first presentation of the year done in January – that of Ernie Dollar – on the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. (Feel free to check out the program description here)  I learned some cool stuff about the cemetery that borders my alma mater. Check out my tweets @Smitty327 from Jan 5, 2011.  

The camera itself is quite compact, but it mounted easily to the tripod we had, so it was completely hands off.  The only problem we had was when we accidentally turned the camera off for a few seconds, at which point we were able to realize the mistake and resume recording.

The speaker talked from a podium, and showed slides from a projector onto a big screen beside him. Our video focused on the speaker, versus the slides because we knew we could always make the slides available separately. Alternatively I have visions of being able to edit the speaker’s video by incorporating his slides into the presentation at some point. I would like to learn how to edit video and clip stills out of it as well.  Do you have any experience in video editing you could share with us?

The file created is a 720 p .MOV file that ended up being humongous and way too big to upload to the web.  I did a couple of searches on the web and found that 1) you can change the recording settings from 720p to WVGA if you intend to upload the file to the web and 2) a file conversion program you can download here along with an easy to follow tutorial here explaining how to convert a .MOV file to other formats including a .FLV for YouTube!

I have not tried either of these two alternatives out yet because I do not own the camera, but I have forwarded the information on to the camera owner.  We hope to give it a try at least for #1 for our next meeting.

What to do when the speaker does not want to be taped?  By the way, we did video tape our second meeting of the year – Josh Howard’s program on the “Civil War Death Study” (D-OGS program details here)– which is an ongoing research program through the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. He did request that we not release the video to the public at this time as his research is ongoing and going to be published. The video can still be used to take notes from and publish on our website. I don’t know about your genealogy society, but ours always takes “meeting minutes” of our monthly meetings – a volunteer or “Secretary” will take notes about the program and then additional notes on the society “business” that is discussed at the end of the meeting after the program. This is a chance for the board to bring up issues that need to be voted on by the membership or make announcements.  Does your local genealogy society take and publish notes on your speaker presentations?

Our next step will be hopefully to get our presentations online and presented live for our out-of-staters and home-bound members. I am in the process of collecting information from other genealogy societies that are doing this such as the Utah Genealogical Society. You can visit their blog and see their “Virtual Chapter.” 

What does the future hold for my local genealogy society? More blogging, Facebook representation, surname and query exchange via online tools, records management and “cloud computing,” and online membership registration and renewal process.

What technological tools is your local society using?

Photo of PlaySport video camera downloaded from Amazon.com. 

Photo of USA Map downloaded from Smabs Sputzer’s Flikr page 

Motivation Monday

Just a quick blog post to say no, I haven't been hiding.  I've been reading reading and more reading for class class and more class.  I got a little bit stressed out last week, but I nipped it in the butt when I knocked out a bunch of reading on Friday night and I was able to pop in on Miriam's Scanfest on Sunday!

RootsMagic....

I've been fighting with RootsMagic4. It's not as nice as everyone made it out to be. At least not for me. When I imported it from Family Tree Maker 2009, all of the sources disconnect from the person's names. A nice person from the RootsMagic user group mailing list took my database and put it back together again and reattached the sources.  Of course now I can't run my narrative reports because the footnotes that are created from all of the sources that are attached to each name is crashing the software. Sigh. Strike 2. However, I am liking the correspondence and repository list and reporting system that RM4 has to offer. Has this been implemented in Family Tree Maker yet?

Godwin DNA Project....

I joined the Goodwin/Godwin family Surname DNA project as a co-coordinator last month and am slowly getting my feet wet and working my way around the reporting system.  We have a LOT of DNA participants. I am trying to get everyone in order and pedigrees posted and arranged before I start another big recruiting process. Last year I recruited 4 or 5 people and that was enough to send me into shock with trying to analyze and compare paper trails and results and figure out mutations and all that jazz. I juggled with the idea of attending the ftDNA conference in Houston at the end of October, however registration has already closed. It would have been an expensive trip anyways. Instead, I decided to go to the Family History Expo in Atlanta in November.

Genealogical Society...

I'm still pulling teeth with my local genealogical society. They have agreed to let me put up a facebook page, however I have not had time to do so.  We have secured Colleen Fitzpatrick as a speaker at next month's meeting. I'm really looking forward to hearing her speak and meeting her! I'm debating whether or not to run for office. They really have a lot of stuff to do to get back into the swing of things, although I'm still proud of what they have been able to accomplish so far this year.

Blogging...

I haven't blogged much at all. I've got the blogger blues because it seems like no matter what I do - participate in memes, comment on other people's blogs, and follow their blogs, I still feel like no one is reading my blog posts. Although I am at least getting a couple of comments a week, which is great. Finally. I couldn't even get that before! It's not an egotistical thing going on, I assure you. Sometimes I simply like to have input. Sometimes I wonder if the information I'm posting is completely wrong. Like the DNA stuff. I discuss it with experts beforehand, but I still lack confidence that what I'm posting is 100% true. It's nice to have others to bounce ideas off of. Oh well, I'll get off my soapbox now. I'm gonna go back to blogging for me now.  So I'm in this Public History class - by the way - it reminds me that Public History is what I really want to be studying - and not necessarily Library studies, although LS can certainly be a key aspect of the field.... Anyways, my Professor secured a grant to build this interactive website, a kind of blog, in which there is text and clickable links and photos and videos and oral histories and such, that is linked to other university archives. I am very excited to be working on this project because it is what I like to do with my own blog. I have toyed with the idea of learning flash and learning how to jazz up my blog a bit. I was surprised, however, that out of the 30 or so undergraduate and graduate students in my class, only one person blogged and used Twitter, besides the Teacher and that person was me! I couldn't believe it! So it looks like I will get to stand out somehow after all at least in my class as a person who already knows how to blog!

Ok, well speaking of class, I need to get back to it. Thanks for reading.

Durham-Orange Genealogical Society Meeting

Last night I attended my first Durham-Orange Genealogical Society Meeting (DOGS). Their meetings are held the first Wednesday of the month at the Duke Homestead Visitor's Center in Durham off of Duke Homestead Road. The building was easy to find. There were about 20 people in attendance, about 5 of whom were visiting guests like myself. Meeting attendees started showing up about 6:45 for the 7 pm meeting. The meeting ran for 2 hours - about 1.5 hours for the speaker and about 30 minutes for "business."

I'm really glad I attended this meeting because the speaker was Mr. Jim Jones, a gentleman I had bumped into a few weeks ago at the NC State Archives. He had assisted me in finding a miscellaneous Granville Grant. I had no idea that he had a huge personal collection of all of the North Carolina State Land Grants that were issued in present day Wake County (includes all counties Wake was formed from) - about 2200 land grants in all.

Mr. Jones gave a presentation on his research project which entailed mapping all of the Wake County, North Carolina State Land Grants, as well as the Granville Grants, into a proprietary software program called "DeedMapper(tm)." Mr. Jones' presentation was clear and concise, easy to read and easy to follow. It was created and presented in pdf format. He also demonstrated the functionality of the DeedMapper(tm) software by directly opening it from his laptop. I have posted more information on his presentation of DeedMapper(tm) here.

After Mr. Jones' presentation, the meeting moderator directed the conversation to "Business matters." The first order of business was the National Genealogical Conference which was held in Raleigh, NC May 11-16, 2009. The Durham-Orange Genealogical Society had a booth in the exhibit hall and many of its members attended the four day conference presentations, about 19 in all. Standing room only was noticed in front of the booth in the exhibit hall. A query sheet was created for visitors to submit a request for information about a particular family or surname, as well as a sign up sheet for new members. Queries received will be published to the DOGS newsletter that is distributed to its members by both snail mail and email.

The DOGS board is currently operating without a President or a Vice President. The society plans to hold a special elections as soon as possible to fill these two vacant positions. Obtaining a position on a local genealogical society board is one of my long term goals. I wonder what would be required of the candidates to run for one of these two vacant positions?

I signed up to become a member in the DOGS society. I downloaded an application form, filled it out, and put it and my $20 check in the mail. Membership includes access to the periodic journal, Trading Path, that encompasses genealogical and historical information on the old Orange County (NC) and queries of members and non-members, member information, and information on general genealogy happenings. A monthly newsletter with local events, including a calendar, and short articles of general genealogy interest is also made available via the internet.