Saturday, 11 October 2014
Great day today and well worth the hour and a half drive to the Acton Memorial Library in Acton, Massachusetts. Acton is about 20 miles north-west of Boston. I made a practice run at the Middlesex Chapter of the Massachusetts Society of Genealogists with a new presentation thanks to Deborah Lee Stewart, Sharon Christenson, Erica Dakin Voolich, Patricia Stano-Carpenter, Jeff Carpenter, Paul Keeler and all the members of the Middlesex Chapter. I met a few more of my "Genealogy Facebook Friends" such as Elizabeth Pyle Handler,Midge Frazel and a few Bassett and Chapin cousins! Looks like "Search Strategies/Search Sites..." was well received but I'm still tempted to tweak, tweak and tweak some more! And now off to present it at the NERGC conference in the spring. Thanks, MSoG, for the support!
For me, at least, there's always something to learn in spite of the fact that I'm the one that's supposed to be doing the "teaching." This is an important element to any subject that's not driven by science or even logic. Genealogy is an on-going study. Who are (or were) the people, where did their lives take place, how to locate the records (and document them!) and understanding that in spite of the marketing by Ancestry.com and its shaky leaves, "it's not all on the internet!!" I've heard highly respected experts proclaim that anywhere from 5% to perhaps less than 10% of the available data can be found on line. That's a lot of information that no amount of on line searching will uncover. That number is changing daily as more and more records are digitized, indexed and uploaded. But the goal is not a static one as each day bring millions, perhaps billions of new records that have been created and need to be processed.
Even with all that can be discovered in libraries, archives, attics and tag sales, we spent nearly 2 hours fine tuning our collective research techniques with the theme "Get out of that rut!" We hardly mentioned a library, even though the meeting took place in one! Nor did we talk about NARA, the Boston Public Library or any other off-line resource where that other 90-95% of our research should take place.
And I've got to admit, I was in a rut myself...no more!
