SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT THE
BYU FH & GENEALOGY CONF 31 JUL-03 AUG 2012
©2012 by Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2011-08-07.
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Valley Technology and Genealogy Group Home Page or Don Snow's Class Listings Page .
These are not in any special order. Some of them
I learned in classes and others from talking to people in the halls.
- The conference information and schedule are posted at http://ce.byu.edu/cw/cwgen/
. There was some talk that they may be able to post parts of
the keynote addresses on that website. This year everyone got
a CD with a pdf of the syllabus, but the hard copy cost an extra $30
and I don't think very many bought the hard copy. Because of
that Diane and I printed and handed out one-page summaries of our
two presentations. Our talks were well-attended and seemed to
go over well. The updated notes are posted at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
. Our talks were Your
Personal Genealogy Library: Family History Books Online
and The
Best Things in Life are Free: Freeware for Family History . In
the books online talk we discussed the Family History Library,
Google Books, Internet Archive, HeritageQuest Online, and a few
others. In the freeware talk we discussed the programs
Everything, Evernote, Q-Dir, PDF-XChange Viewer, FastStone Capture,
and Phrase Express.
- The first keynote address was by Richard Turley, Assistant Church
Historian, on the early history of FamilySearch.org . Most of
his presentation dealt with events of 1999 with the launch of
www.familysearch.org
. He talked about how the website was wildly more popular than
they had ever supposed and he showed video clips of the NBC Today
show interviewing him and others, the results of finding FH info for
the Today Show anchors, and his interview by Barbara Walters.
Bro. Turley talked about other events that year including the gunman
in the FHL and the tornado that touched down in Salt Lake City that
summer. His talk about the launch of FamilySearch.org brought
back lots of memories for Diane and me since we had been called as
FH missionaries to serve as Directors of the New York FHC in
Manhattan and had no idea that that year was going to be so
momentous for the Church and FH. We were in on a lot of those
happenings and interviews and were asked to do the FH for two of the
NBC Today anchors and for the Head of PBS in New York City. We
even took Bro. Turley to a musical that we were able to get
last-minute tickets to while he was there.
- One of the other keynote addresses was by Rod DeGiulio, VP of
FamilySearch International. He talked about what's happening
with FamilySearch around the world now and, in particular, what's
happening in Italy. He was a VP of the Hewlett-Packard
Company and had spent 3 years in Italy. After he retired from
HP the Church hired him for FamilySearch International. He
talked about how he had been able to find some of his own Italian
ancestry and told some remarkable stories about that and the
contract the Church has signed with the Italian Government to
digitize, index, and post online all the Italian civil registration
records. Wow! What a gold mine that's going to be for
anyone with Italian ancestry. He said there are already 4
cameras digitizing their records. Someone said their goal is
to cut the time to 2 weeks from digitizing to posting the indexed
record online. He said they are getting inquiries now from
other countries to see if the Church can help them with their
records.
- The third keynote address was by John Titford, a British feature
writer and speaker, about British accents and dialects. He
talked about different accents and uses of terms in various parts of
the UK and had funny and interesting stories to tell.
- Pedigree Resource File (PRF) is online, but not all of it since
the Church doesn't have permission to post everything online from
the PRF CD's and DVD's. So don't throw out your PRF CD's and
DVD's from home or your FHC since they have information on them that
is not online.
- The 1940 US Census is completely indexed at FamilySearch now, but
will take another month to get the index and images posted
completely. They told us that the next major project will be to
index immigration and naturalization records. FamilySearch
will have a means of correcting mistakes in the 1940 US Census index
soon and that's good since I'm indexed as Donald R. Suer, not Donald
R. Snow, in Los Angeles in the 1940 Census. It's the same way
in Ancestry's index.
- The Church has a major need for Records Preservation Missionaries
at present. You can even serve at home. Karma Tomlinson
at TomlinsonKL@familysearch.org
is the Records Preservation Mission Coordinator. Email her for
information.
- Google+ is similar to Facebook, but with a couple of additional
features. It has only been out for about 1 year.
- The BYU Center for Family History and Genealogy -- http://familyhistory.byu.edu
-- has several new projects and their Immigrant Ancestor Project has
lots more records now. They have students going through the
outbound migration records from European countries, rather than
looking at the passenger lists coming into the US. They have
also just posted Bertram Merrell's Cheshire, England, Marriage
Index. See their website for many new projects.
- The BYU Family History Library has a wealth of LDS and Utah
information posted on their website -- http://lib.byu.edu/sites/familyhistory/
.
- Ancestral Quest 14 has a new feature of forming timelines of your
ancestors, including local events like wars and censuses where it
finds locations in your ancestor's data -- http://www.ancquest.com/index.htm
.
- The Church History Catalog is at http://churchhistorycatalog.lds.org/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=1&dstmp=1344316711334&vid=ALL_PUBLIC&fromLogin=true
which includes FH books online, BYU Digital Collections, Internet
Archives (which has posted all Conference Reports since 1880, but
the Church only printed one or two for General Conferences before
1900, all Improvement Era Magazines, and Instructor Magazines.)
It appears that all 400,000 images from the 74-DVD Selected
Collections DVD's are now posted and that includes Erastus Snow's
journal. The Church History Library URL
is https://www.lds.org/churchhistory/library
. At the CHL they also have minutes of
meetings, manuscript histories, many photographs, and much more and
if you are doing research on any Church organization be sure to
check the CHL. They passed out free booklets called "Selected
LDS Family and Local History Sources at the Church History Library"
which are available there. Some other links that may be
helpful are https://history.lds.org/?lang=eng
; http://archiveswiki.historians.org/index.php/Church_History_Library
; and Selected Church History Manuscript
Collections which includes the Journal History Index
1830-1972 and many of the Journal History images -- http://churchhistorycatalog.lds.org/primo_library/libweb/pages/collections.jsp
- FamilySearch Family Tree is the new interface for "new
FamilySearch". They reported that nFS needs to be removed as
soon as possible after FS Family Tree has all the capabilities since
you can change some things in FS FT that can't be changed in nFS, so
if you make some changes in FS FT they don't show in nFS. So
if you delete something in FS FT, it may still show in nFS. You can now add source URL's in FS FT and edit
relationships there, but you can't in nFS. To
access FS FT you use your LDS account and sign up (just need to do
this once) at https://familysearch.org/invite/familytree_tab
. Then when you go to http://www.familysearch.org/
and sign in with your LDS account you see a new tab called "Family
Tree" which shows your data in the new format. You can edit
your temple ordinance requests in FS FT, but you have to initiate
them in nFS still.
- George W. Scott has written two free books to help you use
FamilySearch Family Tree. You can download them from http://usingfamilysearch.com
. They are called "How To Use Family Tree Wisely" (101-page
manual for beginners) and "Family Tree, For The Experienced New
FamilySearch User" (55-page manual). He has also posted some
free video tutorials about Family Tree on that site.
- George Ryskamp gave a talk comparing your tree on FamilySearch
Family Tree versus posting it on Ancestry's trees. He pointed
out that it's like comparing apples and oranges and they have major
differences.
- Jill Crandall, Director of the BYU Center for Family History and
Genealogy, is producing a new program (beta test soon) called
ResearchTies that helps with research logs and sources. The
URL is http://ResearchTies.com
.
- There were several new vendors there this time, but some of the
old familiar ones weren't there and I don't know why.
- One of the WPA (Works Project Administration) projects was an
inventory of historical records in the US. This was during the
Great Depression (1935-1943) and they produced many helpful
typewritten record lists. Most of these have never been
published nor posted online. Before doing research in an area,
check to see if you can find any WPA inventories of records in that
area and you might find lots of records to search that you weren't
aware of. After the US Government ended their support, many
states continued the projects to finish cataloging their
records. A helpful article is
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~flmgs/articles/Works_Projects_AdministrationMarch2011_BM.pdf
. Some examples of WPA records from Washington County Utah
that I have used are posted at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~utwashin/wpa/index.html
.
- There are more than 80 lineage-linked family trees from 22
geographical regions on FamilySearch's Community Family Trees
now. This is different than the Trees button on
FamilySearch. You can get to FS Community Family Trees in
several ways, one of which is http://histfam.familysearch.org/
. Click on See Community Trees to see the list and locations
of the projects all around the world. There is also a section
for oral histories.
- The Ancestry Insider gave a humorous talk about Records Are The
Darnest Things. He had lots of funny
examples and some are on his blog http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/
.
That's a quick list of a few of the things I learned. I'm sure I'll
remember others that I should have included. With so many
changes occurring daily in FH, it's hard to keep up with it all, but
hopefully this list will help someone out there.
Return to the Utah Valley Technology
and Genealogy Group Home Page or Don
Snow's Class Listings Page .