Follow up information to my 15 May webinar on Developing Good Research Habits

Paula Stuart-Warren  Citations, Evernote, Syllabus, Webinars  Leave a comment

Thank you to my readers who joined me in yesterday’s webinar Developing Good Research Habits for the Board for Certification of Genealogists on Legacy Family Tree webinars.  Several inquiries (and my answers) at the end of my presentation might be of interest to others. I hope I answered everyone who contacted me by email, this blog, and on Facebook.

 

1. First of all, the webinar is now available free through 22 May.  Click here on the webinar website and scroll down to BCG. This is my affiliate link that does produce a small commission that helps in work to produce more webinars.

 

2. A guide for citations

The book I mentioned and helpfully aided by Rick Sayre and Marian Pierre Louis is by Elizabeth Shown Mills. It’s a big tome, but with a great index. After a few days of crafting citations, you will be a pro at it.

Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2015.

Also check  Cyndi’s List  under the category of “Citing Sources” for dozens of links to websites that deal with the topic.

 

2. Evernote (and One Note)

The book I mentioned is by Kerry Scott.  How to Use Evernote for Genealogy: A Step‑by‑Step Guide to Organize Your Research and Boost Your Genealogy Productivity. Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2015.

Also check Cyndi’s List under the categories of “Evernote for Every Genealogist” and “Organizing Your Research.”

 

3. Legacy Family Tree webinars

Many past webinars on the website cover these topics and more. My affiliate link for subscribing is: http://legacy.familytreewebinars.com/?aid=1739.

A membership gives you access to all of the 700+ webinars and accompanying syllabus. Talk about great education!

 

 

Repost: Some great basic genealogy guidebooks

Paula Stuart-Warren  Books  2 Comments

As promised during the questions on tonight’s BCG webinar, here is the repost about a few guidebooks.   Genealogy guidebooks are an important part of our genealogical education. The list below is a sampling of basic genealogy guidebooks that are important to beginning and for more advanced researchers.  If you are only checking online resources and yet wondering what other records there might be, these guides will fill you with tons of ideas and places to look. This is not a list of all that is available.

1.    Croom, Emily Anne. Unpuzzling Your Past. 4th Ed. “Expanded, Updated and Revised.” Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2010.

2.    Greenwood, Val D. The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. 4th ed. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2017.

3.   Morgan, George. How to Do Everything Genealogy. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015.

4.  Rose, Christine and Kay Ingalls. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Genealogy. 3d ed. New York: Alpha Books, 2012.

May 17, 2018—Stump the Genealogist—Open Question and Answer with Professional Genealogist Paula Stuart-Warren,

Paula Stuart-Warren  Uncategorized  4 Comments

I was going to compose a post to tell about an event for Thursday, May 17, but the St. Croix Valley Genealogical Society already has the info put together on its website. We did this a couple years ago and people stayed for three hours with questions. I was able to answer most questions but if I don’t know the answer specifically, I can point you to a place to find the sought-after information.

Won’t you join us in River Falls, Wisconsin at the public library meeting room at 7:00 p.m.? Even if you don’t have a specific question, it’s a time to learn from those that others present. If you live in the Twin Cites area, it’s less than an hour to River Falls. The meeting and parking are free. You might consider joining the society, though!

May 17, 2018—Stump the Genealogist—Open Question and Answer with Professional Genealogist Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, FMGS, FUGA—Bring your questions, especially those that relate to brick wall problems, and ask a professional. Paula should be able to give you direction to take your research to the next level.

paula-head-shot

Paula Stuart-Warren, Certified Genealogist, is an internationally recognized genealogical educator, researcher, and consultant focusing on unusual resources, manuscripts, methodology, and analyzing records. She specializes in Midwestern research; Native American research; the Works Progress Administration (WPA); railroad records; the fur trade; emigration, immigration, and naturalization records; court records; federal records; Catholic records, and numerous other areas. She spends extensive research time at state archives, historical societies, and at various locations of the National Archives. She is a long-time course coordinator and instructor for SLIG (Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy) and GRIP (Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh) and for Ancestry Academy, and has presented seminars all across the U.S. and in Canada. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of FGS (Federation of Genealogical Societies), of the Minnesota Genealogical Society, and a former officer of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Eight of her foreign born ancestors chose Wisconsin as their first place to settle in the U.S. Of those, five then moved to Minnesota.

My Free BCG webinar Tues. May 15: Developing Good Research Habits

Paula Stuart-Warren  Board for Certification of Genealogists, Webinars  4 Comments

Join my free webinar Developing Good Research Habits on Tuesday, May 15, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. EDT (7 CDT, 6 MDT, 5 PDT) and the middle of the morning or night in some other countries!  This is a Board for Certification of Genealogists presentation and is hosted on Legacy Family Tree Webinars.

Developing those good, er, successful research habits takes planning, time, experience, and patience to be effective. Learn steps and tools for becoming a better researcher both at home and in repositories, and for developing successful habits that make the most of your genealogy time budget.

The presentation is accompanied by a handout. Register for this webinar at Legacy Family Tree.

BCG has many presentations that are part of the hundreds of webinars at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. To view all these archived webinars, join Legacy Family Tree for full access. Heck, it averages out to $4.17 per month for unlimited viewing of the webinars and handouts.

These are affiliate links for which a small percentage is paid.

 

 

Railroad record collection organization at Cornell University

Paula Stuart-Warren  Railroads  Leave a comment

I love my Google News alerts that share news relate to records, repositories, and family history. In my various presentations on railroad records and family history, one repository I usually include in the discussion is in Ithaca, New York. Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives has an amazing collection of records from railroads, railroad worker labor unions, photographs, books, articles, payroll records, and correspondence. This is on my bucket list of places at which I want to research in person. It’s not just a New York related collection.

The 2 May 2018 edition of the Cornell Chronicle shares news about additional organizing of the collection. From the article:

“A 2015 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission funded the work, which organized 63 of the more than 200 railroad collections held by the Kheel Center.

Comprising 380 boxes of records, photographs, correspondence and more, the 63 newly processed railroad collections support research in the ILR School and beyond. They document the often tense relationship between railroad carriers and the groups representing their workers, and range roughly from the 18th century – when horse-drawn carts traversed the tracks and whale oil lit the headlamps on steam engines – to the 2000s.”

Read the article here and learn more about some of the collection here.

9 more reasons to sign up for the GRIP course: Tools for Digging Deeper

Paula Stuart-Warren  Conferences/Institutes, Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh, GRIP  4 Comments

As I work on material for this year’s Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh’s week in the Buffalo, New York area, I decided to see what suggestions had been made in the evaluations for the past years of my course.  The course I coordinate, Intermediate Genealogy: Tools for Digging Deeper, did receive some good suggestion which will be incorporated. It was also heartwarming to read the kudos our team of instructors for this course has received. A selection of these:

 

  • I thought all the material was well prepared and presented.
  • Group project was very useful.
  • The newspaper class was particularly good.
  • I enjoyed the real world examples.
  • I learned a lot and got my money worth.
  • Specifically liked the variety of topics.
  • Keep doing what you are doing. You each have your own styles. It’s marvelous.
  • It really has opened my eyes to new ways to think and research.
  • Very nice to gain different perspectives & benefits from expertise & styles.

 

It always nice to be complimented for our intensive work on the course sessions. We also received some nice comments about each of the instructors. I hope you will be able to join us in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. The area is filled with places to research family history.

To learn more, visit the GRIP website.

 

DNA Quest by MyHeritage goes global for adoptees

Paula Stuart-Warren  Adoption, DNA  1 Comment

This is an update from MyHeritage:

“DNA Quest is our pro bono initiative to reunite adopted people with their biological family members. We are providing 15,000 MyHeritage DNA kits, worth more than one million dollars, for free, to eligible participants. DNA Quest has just been expanded globally so that now anyone from any country can apply. Applications can be submitted until April 30th, 2018 on www.dnaquest.org. If this is applicable to you, apply today, otherwise please help spread the word.”

Back on March 1, I blogged about the pro bono tests initial offering. Read that here.

Please feel free to share this post to let others know.

 

 

GRIP genealogy education this summer! Discounted tuition ends April 30th.

Paula Stuart-Warren  Conferences/Institutes, Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh, GRIP  Leave a comment

Early bird discount on tuition to the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh (GRIP) ends in about one week on April 30. Only 2 courses out of 22 have wait lists. All other courses are open for registration for classes held June 25-29 and July 23-27 in Pittsburgh and July 30-Aug 3 in Amherst, NY (Buffalo). See www.GRIPitt.org/courses for full descriptions of all 18 sessions in each of the 22 courses.

On-campus housing is available at this time for all three weeks. Any questions? Email GRIP or visit the GRIP booth at the NGS conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan May 2-5.

This year, my course Intermediate Genealogy: Tools for Digging Deeper is offered near Buffalo, New York. It will be at Daemen College in Amherst. Read more about this in-depth learning here.

It’s important to register soon for this course, so that you will receive the mid-May special instructions for assistance in solving one of your “brick walls” during the course.

 

April 26 webinar: “. . . Finding Records of Germanic Organizations and Other Collections”

Paula Stuart-Warren  Germanic Research, Webinars  Leave a comment

The well-known Germanic Genealogy Society (GGS), a world-wide organization based here in Minnesota, is now offering webinars. The live webinars are open to the public, however, attendance is limited. Be sure to sign into the webinar early.

If you are a member of GGS, you have access to the handouts and recorded videos. These are accessible to signed-in GGS members under the Member Login. Join Now to gain full access. GGS also has great educational meetings and publications. I have been a member for many years.

 

This Thursday, April 26 at 8:00 p.m. CDT, I am the webinar presenter for GGS. 

“They Joined, They Wrote, They Associated: Finding Records of Germanic Organizations and Other Collections.”

U.S. libraries, historical societies, archives, and university libraries special collections sections hold the records from many organizations that our Germanic ancestors joined. The organization may have been a German heritage, charitable, religious, resettlement, political, social, or other organization. Additionally, as parts of our families migrated around the U.S., so did the records. Frequently genealogists think that there may be no records for some of the family. However, there may be substantial information buried away in a manuscript collection.

Finding these collections with records of membership, donations, necrologies, stories, activities, and more has become easier in recent years. Many finding aids online and off lead you to these research nuggets that represent hundreds of years of material. This presentation covers the finding aids, what the descriptions tell us, how to use the descriptions and suggestions for accessing the Germanic family nuggets promised by the cataloging and indexing. The visuals will demonstrate the fantastic ancestral details found in such records, including places of origin in Germanic localities beyond the U.S.

Register Now!

 

Big sales now for DNA Day!

Paula Stuart-Warren  DNA  4 Comments

DNA Day is April 25th, but the big discount sales have already begun on many tests.  Visit the websites of AncestryDNA, Family Tree DNA, 23 & Me, My Heritage, and Living DNA. Just type the company name into your favorite search engine.

I hope you are already monitoring at least a few of the many informational DNA blogs, websites, and the many pages on Facebook that really provide help with learning about and analyzing your DNA results.