SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT FH EXPO 2013 ST. GEORGE, 22-23 Feb 2013
by Donald R. Snow
This is posted on my class notes webpage  http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html  with active Internet links.

1.     The website for the St. George FH Expo 2013 with list of presentations is https://www.familyhistoryexpos.com/viewevent/index/60 .  All registrants had access before the conference to download pdf's of all the presentations and at the conference they got a CD with the entire syllabus.  You could also buy a hardcopy of the syllabus for an additional $25.  The syllabus has 400 pages and was the same syllabus as for the Mesa, Arizona FH Expo in January.  This was the 10th Anniversary of FH Expos, so many of the presentations had "10" in the title, e.g. "Top 10 Techniques for...".  The format was different from earlier Expos with the program going from 1 - 8 PM on Friday and from 10 - 5 PM on Saturday which seemed short, but took advantage of evening times for classes with no dinner planned.  There were more than 80 presentations with 10 going on concurrently and there were about 40 vendor booths which people could visit without being registered for the conference.

2.     The keynote address was given by James L. Tanner, retired attorney from Mesa, Arizona, at 1 PM on Friday.  His address was titled something like 10 tips for finding ancestors, including what to search, ways to do it, and how to keep track of what you have looked at.  He is the blogger of the very popular Genealogy's Star blog at  http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/ .  Reports in the St. George newspapers estimated that 1000 people attended the keynote address which they could attend without registering for the Expo.

3.     Barbara Renick gave several classes including one on database idiosyncrasies.  She pointed out that there are 3 versions of Ancestry and there are different ways you can search in each, so it pays to read the search tips for the version you are working with.  She showed the results of different types of searches for the same individual.  She mentioned that only Ancestry subscription version has a "Shoebox" that you can put stuff in and come back to easily.  She said that in the Card Catalog search template it is better to use the keyword field than the title field since, if you are searching for death records, the word "death" may not be in the title of the record because it might be titled something like "Information on Deceased...".  So putting "death" in the title field won't pick it those kinds of records.  She discussed "fielded" databases vs "open text" databases and pointed out that you need different search techniques for each type.  Fielded databases have fields for the name, dates, parents, birth date, etc., whereas open text databases are just text and you have to read the context to know whether a name is the child or the parent, etc.  She is giving a full lecture on fielded vs open text databases at the National Genealogical Society Annual Meeting in Las Vegas in May -- http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/cs/conference_info .  She gave lots of other examples from other websites, including FamilySearch.  She pointed out that in WorldVitalRecords you can now browse by surname and to find variations of the surname you can narrow the list down by using more and more letters, e.g. R, then re, then ren, then reni, etc., and she showed several variations of her name in the records that you wouldn't think of without doing this.  She also pointed out that if you are using Ancestry at a FHC, you many need to log out and back in since the previous person may have left settings that you don't want, e.g. they may have set it to do exact name searches and you wonder why you don't get other hits.

4.     From somewhere I learned that http://billiongraves.com/ which is somewhat like http://www.findagrave.com/ , but with many fewer records so far, also contains the GPS coordinates of the grave.  Those are only in FindAGrave if someone entered them.  Both websites are major sources of death and cemetery information and BillionGraves is included in Historical Records in https://familysearch.org/ .

5.     My daughter, Jennifer Snow Jackson of West Valley City, helped me with a presentation about Evernote, PhraseExpress, and ResophNotes  My wife, Diane, was scheduled to teach with me, but passed away 4 months ago.  The programs Jenny and I discussed were freeware note programs that help in FH.  As an example, in Evernote I formed a notebook of the FH Expo class note pdf's using my desktop computer at home.  Then when my Evernote file was synchronized online, the notes were available on my tablet at the conference without an Internet connection.  And Evernote OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) all the notes so they were every-word searchable on my tablet.  The class notes for our presentation are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html . 

6.     The other class that my daughter Jennifer taught with me was about letter collections and we used our Erastus Snow Family Letters as an example.  The class notes and all our transcriptions of the Erastus Snow family letters are posted online at http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html .  We showed a short PowerPoint of some things we learned about Erastus Snow and his families from the letters and then told how we had the family help work on transcribing all 225 of these letters and how we are doing the final editing.  Since most people have letters saved somewhere, we hope this gave people ideas of what to do to transcribe them, form a database, and analyze them all.  One lady told me afterwards that she was going to use some of these ideas for her presentation at the Mormon History Association meeting in Layton, Utah in June since her talk there wold be on a collection of letters -- http://www.mormonhistoryassociation.org/conferences .

7.     My daughter, Linda Snow Westover from Orem, gave two presentations, one on beginning British research and one on "bulk genealogy".  Her British research class showed how to search  http://freebmd.org.uk/ and the British censuses to put families together.  She showed how to set up a spreadsheet with all the births and deaths of a given surname from Free BMD and analyze the information to pin down which death went with which birth to get the family information.  She showed that for the surname she had studied, she was able to determine almost all the deaths for the given births, so it helped put the families together that she was looking for and there were only a few for which she needed to send for the costly certificates.
 
8.     Linda Westover's class on "bulk genealogy" showed her idea of selecting a large database to search and then making a "shopping list" of names from your genealogy program that should be in the large database.  You use "Focus/Filter", or whatever it's called in your program, to make the shopping list.  You then go through your list to find all the names that might be in the selected record.  She mentioned databases like the World War I Draft Records.  I heard several people comment, "Oh, I could do that and find sources like that for my people."  I thought it was a helpful idea and simple to do and I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest it before.

9.     Tom Kemp gave a class on newspapers and said we need to approach searching newspapers just like searching a census:  assume the people are there and just keep looking until you find them.  He said not to limit searches to just newspapers near where the event occurred since it may have been mentioned in a newspaper far away.  He pointed out that there is a complete list of US newspapers, their locations, and the dates they were published, on the Library of Congress website.  Tom is Director of Genealogy Products NewsBank which claims to have the largest collection of small town and big city US newspapers online.  They are all searchable with a new search engine.  It shows lists of newspapers in each state and the search template now allows key words to be included and excluded.  It also allows wildcards and Boolean searches.  This is a commercial website and I don't think it's on the premium website portal at FHC's, but another newspaper archive is.

10.     Tom Kemp also gave a class on websites and said we ought to be posting copies of our genealogy finds online so that after we die our records will still be available.  He said that more than likely when we die the paper documents in our file cabinets will be trashed and all that research lost unless we have summarized it, digitized it, and posted it online somewhere.  He said the "big 4" websites to post our stuff on are FamilySearch, Ancestry, Facebook, and Pinterest, and that if we are posting our stuff elsewhere it might be lost.  I'm not sure I agree with that since the Wayback Machine on Internet Archive  http://archive.org/index.php  takes "snapshots" of the entire Internet every few days so you can go there and find websites that are no longer on the Internet.  But I don't know whether that allows searches of the entire Internet at earlier times.  Tom said Pinterest has individual and surname pages where people are posting information.  His ideas have made me think about all the 11 file cabinets full of hard copy FH records that I have and that I need to start scanning them, at least.  He pointed out that social media may give you contact with ancestors and relatives far away and that we should keep our trees current on FamilySearch and Ancestry so people can find them.  He said we can also post reports of our research on  http://www.scribd.com/  where you can set up a free account.  You can post your results there, without final publishing, so you can update it anytime you want.

11.     I learned of many free Family History classes and webinars at several sites including  https://familysearch.org/ , http://www.familytreewebinars.com/ , and  http://www.heritagecollector.com/webinars.htm .

12.     That's a summary of a few things I learned and I hope it gives you a couple of new FH ideas too.  The 400-page syllabus has lots more information and I think you can still order the CD, if you want.  It was a good conference and it hardly seems possible that it's been 10 years since their first one in St. George.  I remember attending that first one, and many of the others since, when we weren't away on missions.