SOME THINGS I LEARNED AT FH
EXPO 2013 ST. GEORGE, 22-23 Feb 2013
by
Donald R. Snow
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.
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.