Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

SCGS webinars: The deal of the century

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I live in Missouri. California barely makes an appearance in my genealogy. Yet I’m a happy member of the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS). Why? Because of their amazing educational opportunities, available and pertinent to all.

SCGS offers twice-monthly webinars from big names in genealogy. For $35 a year, I became a member so that I could watch the webinars on demand. But here’s the great thing: You can watch the webinar for free, if you watch it being streamed live. However, you must register in advance. To do that, go to the webinars page, then click on the title of the webinar you’re interested in. That will take you to a registration page.

On Saturday, November 7, Cyndi Ingle (of Cyndi’s List fame) will be presenting Building a Digital Research Plan at 10 am Pacific time. Here’s a description of that webinar:

Using Internet databases and catalogs we will build a research plan to answer a specific research question. We will walk through the process of planning, researching for the plan, and keeping track of what has been researched.

I think that sounds tremendous (it’s right up my alley). If you invest $35 a year to be a member, you can view the webinar any time you want and you can also view archived webinars. You could have your own mini-genealogy conference in the comfort of your home.

Speaking of conferences, SCGS sponsors the Genealogy Jamboree in June in Burbank, California. I attended in 2015 and it was excellent. The webinar series is an extension of the Jamboree.

I am so grateful that the SCGS offers resources to folks all over the world. Membership truly feels like the deal of the century!

Announcing new Orderly Roots guides!

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10 secrets to organizing your genealogy researchI’m very excited to announce the launch of a new series of downloadable pdfs that I’m offering for sale here on Organize Your Family History.  I’m calling the series Orderly Roots, and the first is now available for purchase.

The Orderly Roots guides give me a way to go a little more in-depth on genealogy organizing topics than I can on the blog. 10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research, the first of a planned series of 10 such guides,  is available now!

Each guide is delivered as a downloadable pdf with ten pages of text. They sell for $8.99 each. Here’s the list of topics I’m planning so far:

I’d love your input on topics. Do any of these particularly float your boat? Are there any topics not on the list that you’d like to see me explore in an Orderly Roots Guide?

10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research is hot off the (figurative) presses and I plan to make 10 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Doing Genealogy available this week. [Update: I just made it available for purchase!] The rest, I hope, will be completed by year’s end.

I’d love your input on topics and may create a poll to post on the blog. In the meantime, feel free to give me feedback in the comments!

Professional organizers talk family history

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As a professional organizer who blogs (in addition writing here, I have a blog at my business’s Peace of Mind Organizing website), I occasionally  participate in the monthly Professional Organizers Blog Carnival. Each month organizing bloggers are asked to submit a single post that matches that month’s theme.

I was delighted to see that the theme for October is Family History. My biggest challenge was to decide which blog post to submit! I ended up submitting one from my organizing website, Tracing my roots: Why I love genealogy research.

The Blog Carnival was published today and it occurred to me that readers of Organize Your Family History might enjoy perusing the 14 family-history-related blog posts in the Carnival. My organizing colleagues write great stuff.

So here’s the link: Family History – Professional Organizers Blog Carnival.

Enjoy!

Download NGS conference recordings

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ngslogo200I was really blown away by the quality of the conference sessions I attended at the National Genealogical Society conference this past May. The sessions were in depth and quite scholarly and I really felt like it was a great value. Of course, that value was enhanced by the fact that the conference was held within easy driving distance of my home. But I liked it so much I’m giving serious consideration to attending the 2016 NGS conference in Ft. Lauderdale, May 4-7.

This weekend I was spending a little time on my backlog of papers picked up at the conference this year (I didn’t manage to properly process my NGS papers) and found the order form for conference session recordings. I was delighted to see that they are available as MP3s, rather than CDs, since my 2014 MacBook doesn’t have a CD drive. I downloaded three sessions, and so far have listened to one.

At $9 each, these downloadable sessions are a great deal, in my opinion. If you’re interested, just go to the 2015 NGS conference page of Jamb Inc’s website. (And while you’re there take notice of  the fact there are many past NGS conference recordings available, as well as other genealogy conferences).

I downloaded two sessions I wasn’t able to attend, about resources in states I’m researching, as well one I did attend (Julie Miller’s excellent Anatomy of a Pension File). I wanted to hear Julie’s talk again, as I proceed in processing my own ancestors’ Civil War pension files. And I’m glad I did; it’s already been very helpful.

Whether you attended the conference or didn’t, you might find these recordings really helpful.