Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Stacy Julian reopening her 20in20 online course (for a good cause)

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I became a huge fan of Stacy Julian when I heard her speak at RootsTech. After RootsTech, I shared details of her talk Do Something with that Box! here and I referenced it in my own talk, The Imperfect Genealogist.

Stacy is all about helping people tell stories, particularly family stories. I’m on her mailing list and I received an email this week that she is her reopening her yearlong online course, 20in20. Here’s a short video about the course.

In a nutshell, participants will create 20 projects over the course of a year. It was originally intended to take place in the calendar year 2020. Enrollment closed months ago. But that changed this week. Stacy wrote in her email:

“As I have contemplated current events—especially those that have exposed racial inequality in the United States—I have made the decision to reopen 20in20 and donate ALL of the proceeds to organizations and efforts making a difference for people of color.”

I was very impressed by this and I asked her if I could share the information here. Here’s another great piece of news. The price has been cut in half–to $60–to encourage enrollment. See the 20in20 page on Stacy’s website for where and how she’s donating the proceeds and to sign up.

This strikes me as an amazing opportunity to create some wonderful projects, with the help of an amazing teacher, at a big discount and to do good at the same time. I just had to share.

NGS 2020 virtual family history conference recordings available for purchase

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The National Genealogical Society made some serious lemonade when it figured out what to deal with their conference, which was to be held in May in Salt Lake City, in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Rather than cancelling it, they made it virtual. As I understand it, this is what they did. (It’s relevant today because you can now purchase recordings of the presentations that would have been made at the conference.)

Registrants for the conference could watch five featured presentations live. Well, sort of live, on May 20. The presentations from Judy Russell, Blaine Bettinger, Elizabeth Shown Mills, Thomas Wright Jones and storyteller and re-enactor Stephanie Raff, were pre-recorded (to prevent technical snafus) and streamed on May 20. The presenters monitored the live chat during the streaming of their recorded presentations so that registrants had a more live, conference-like experience.

There were also three sponsored sessions that were presented as part of the live event on May 20. And another 18 sponsored bonus sessions were recorded.

See this page for a list of the NGS Live! presentations and sponsored presentations.

The rest of the conference presenters–a total of 85 presentations–recorded their lectures, which will be available for streaming. See this page for a list of those presentations.

If you’re interested in watching the NGS lectures, there are three streaming packages available. They all include the 26 above-mentioned featured presentations and bonus sessions and the syllabus.

  • Light package: Your choice of 10 sessions, plus the 26 additional sessions for $150 for NGS members/$185 for non-members.
  • Full package: Your choice of 20 sessions, plus the 26 additional sessions, for $215 for members/$250 for non-members.
  • The Works: Your choice of 45 sessions, plus the additional 26 sessions, for $395 for members/$430 for non-members.

These are available for purchase now; you can choose your OnDemand sessions on June 15 and on July 1, the OnDemand sessions will be released. Once purchased, the subscriptions run from 1 July 2020 to 15 May 2021.

I applaud the ingenuity of the conference planners! They managed to make the content available for the registrants as well as those hadn’t been planning to attend the conference. The presenters still had the chance to create their content for an audience. And I love that people can choose from among all the classes.

I’ve attended the NGS conference twice and both times the classes I took were top notch. I think this is a great opportunity to learn some great stuff at your own pace.

Join me for The Imperfect Genealogist on May 18 on Zoom

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I am excited to be presenting the May program for the North Hills Genealogists, a genealogy society based north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’ll be giving The Imperfect Genealogist, the talk I developed for RootsTech. It will be held via Zoom on Monday, May 18, at 7 pm eastern time. You can learn more about North Hills Genealogists on their website.

I just found out that the meeting is not limited to society members and was given permission to post about it here, in case any blog readers are interested in attending.

I’ll be talking about ways perfectionism can get in the way of enjoyable and productive genealogy research, along with some areas in genealogy where good enough isn’t good enough, in my opinion. I’ll also be discussing some strategies for letting go of perfectionism. The idea for the talk was sparked by the podcast I co-host, Getting to Good Enough.

The presentation will be conducted via Zoom. You don’t need to have a Zoom account to participate, but you do have to sign up online to participate.

 

 

Free access to NGS Monthly archives for a limited time

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Here’s another free resource to explore during any extra time you may have during this pandemic. The National Genealogical Society is providing free access to five years of archives of the NGS Monthly, an online publication usually only available as a benefit to members. Access to the public started yesterday and will continue until July 31. The archive is housed here on the NGS website. It appears that each issue has two articles, so that means there are 120 articles now freely available. NGS encourages you to share this information with family and friends.

Issues are arranged in reverse chronological order, but there is a search bar at the top of the page that will allow you to search the archive. Individual articles are also tagged, so exploring tags of interest is another way to approach reading the archive.

NGS Monthly is currently written and edited by award-winning genealogist Aaron Goodwin and the articles are clear and easy to read. I’m a member of NGS but I have to admit that I haven’t paid close attention to the NGS Monthly. I am grateful to be reminded what a wealth of information is available there!