Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

RootsTech’s livestream schedule

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RootsTech has announced its schedule of sessions being streamed from next week’s conference. If you can’t make it to Salt Lake City, you can at least watch some of the keynotes and breakout sessions. (Alas, my session on Friday morning, Go Paperless: Digitize & Streamline Your Research, isn’t one of them.)

Here’s the schedule. The sessions will be streamed live on the RootsTech homepage and then afterward recordings will be posted on the website for a limited time.

Visit the Sessions page on the RootsTech website for descriptions of each of these sessions.

Wednesday, February 8

9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. | Innovator Summit General Session
Speakers: Steve Rockwood, Liz Wiseman

10:15 a.m.–11:15 a.m. | Industry Trends and Outlook
Speakers: Craig Bott and Guest Panel

11:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. | Innovation—Best Practices and Applications
Speaker: Cydni Tetro

Thursday, February 9

8:30 a.m.-10:00 a.m. | RootsTech General Session
Speakers: Steve Rockwood, Jonathan and Drew Scott

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. | Getting Started in Genealogy
Speaker: Kelli Bergheimer

12:15 p.m.–1:15 p.m. | DNA: The Glue That Holds Families Together
Speaker: Diahan Southard

1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m. | DNA Matching on MyHeritage
Speaker: Dana Drutman

3:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. | Jewish Genealogy: Where to Look and What’s Available
Speaker: Lara Diamond

4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m. | Family History Is Anything but Boring
Speakers: Crystal Farish and Rhonna Farrer

Friday, February 10

8:30 a.m.–10:00 a.m. | RootsTech General Session
Speakers: Levar Burton, Special Guest Panel

10:30 a.m.–11:30 a.m. | RootsTech Innovator Showdown Finals

12:15 p.m.–1:15 p.m. | Mothers, Daughters, Wives: tracing Female Lines
Speaker: Judy Russell

1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m. | Censational Census Strategies
Speaker: Mary Kircher Roddy

3:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. | Big 4: Comparing Ancestry, findmypast, FamilySearch, and MyHeritage
Speaker: Sunny Morton

4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m. | Cross the Atlantic with Religious Records
Speaker: Jen Baldwin

Saturday, February 11

8:30 a.m.–10:00 a.m. | RootsTech General Session
Speakers: Cece Moore, Buddy Valastro

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. | Journaling Principles That Work
Speaker: Steve Reed

1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m. | Don’t Just Be a Searcher, Be a Researcher
Speaker: Crista Cowan

3:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. | Creating Google Alerts for Your Genealogy
Speaker: Katherine R. Wilson

That’s a lot of free information! I hope you can take advantage of it.

The new Genealogy Research Loggers Facebook group

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Genealogy Research Loggers closed Facebook groupBased on the conversation in the comments of last week’s blog post about accountability for creating a research log habit, I started a closed Facebook group called Genealogy Research Loggers. If you’d like to join us and talk about types of research and ask for accountability, please do. Just click on the link and request membership and I’ll approve you. I tried to send email invitations to everyone who commented on that blog post.

Special thanks to Maria Tello, who is a professional genealogist with a solid research log habit, who was the first person to join the group. She’s already been really helpful in sharing a photo of her research log format and explaining her philosophy.

I look forward to some good discussions!

Free access to military records on Find My Past this weekend

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fmpIn honor of Veterans’ Day, FindMyPast, the British-owned genealogy site is offering free access to their 70 million military records this weekend.

You have to register to access them, but there is no cost to register. The records will be available until 11:59 pm (GMT) on Sunday, November 13. (That’s 6:59 pm EST in the US.)

The collections include records from the U.S. and Canada, as well as the UK, Ireland and Australian military.

I’m going to pull out my table of military ancestors and look to see whether FindMyPast has some records I haven’t found before. It seems like a wonderful opportunity to learn more about my military ancestors!

Find help at National Archives’ new History Hub

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historyhubimageI listened to a portion of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Virtual Genealogy Fair this week. It was terrific. For me, there were two big discoveries and a revelation.

First the discoveries:

  1. The talks, slides and handouts from this year’s Virtual Fair — as well as those from the last three Fairs–are freely available online. So if you missed a talk, or just want to revisit one, it’s there for you. (That took the pressure off to sit at my desk all day!) Click to access the 2015 Fair. Here’s 2014. And 2013.
  2. The National Archives has a new website, History Hub, in beta mode. I think it’s really promising. (More on that in a moment.)

I’ll share the revelation with you next week.

I don’t know about you, but I have always found the NARA website to be challenging to navigate. I know there’s info there (and am I’m so glad I figured out how to find my ancestors’ Civil War pension files), but tracking it down can take some effort.

The talk called Innovative Online Resources and Tools to Help with Your Genealogical Research provided some insight into how to navigate the NARA website. It’s worth checking out the talk if you find the NARA website challenging. In the first part of the talk, presenter Sarah Swanson, pointed out ways to navigate the site, and she revealed the many aspects of the site I had overlooked (including a link to the NARA YouTube channel and 16 NARA special-interest blogs!). I’m going to go through the session slides again and familiarize myself with how I can access the vast online holdings. It will also help me plan a research trip to NARA in Washington, DC, perhaps next year.

The second of the talk was about History Hub, which is described as “A support community managed by the National Archives for researchers, citizen historians, archival professionals, and open government advocates.”  The speaker, Kelly Osborn from NARA’s Innovation Office, likened History Hub to the Apple Support Community. If you’ve ever had a problem on an Apple product and googled it, you’ve probably ended up in the Apple Support Community where your question might be answered by an Apple employee or by a fellow Apple user. You might have asked the question yourself or got you needed by reading the answers to someone else’s question. That’s what the National Archives wants to do with History Hub–it’ll be a place where people can get their genealogy questions answered and learn from others’ questions. I think it’s an amazing idea.

Of course, History Hub is the kind of site that will only get better with age as more people use it and offer their expertise. The idea that I can tap into the knowledge of a subject matter expert from the National Archives–as well as other knowledgeable people–is really exciting. The site is searchable and has discussion boards, blogs and community pages. I think it has huge potential and I think it’s really great that the National Archives is embracing innovation this way.

By the way, if you’re getting an error message when you click on the History Hub link, try it in another browser. I found that the link works in Safari and Chrome, but not in Firefox, at least on my computer.

Join the mailing list!

When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.