Society Saturday: 2015 Texas State Genealogical Society Conference

Last weekend I attended the annual conference of the Texas State Genealogical Society, held in Austin, Texas.  Since my parents live there, I was able to combine it with a visit with them.

My justification for getting some time off from work to attend on a Friday were the sessions in the "Courthouse Records and Record Loss" track (which was actually on Sunday afternoon).  Two of these three sessions were by John Sellers, a courthouse records expert, and the other was by Teri Flack, who is chair of the society's Records Preservation and Access Committee.  John also did one of the six general sessions, also on courthouse research.  I feel I understand a lot of the legal terminology better now, as well as what some of these resources contain, and will better be able to assist patrons at my library wanting to use the old courthouse records we store.

Half of the general sessions were done by the incomparable Lisa Louise Cooke of Genealogy Gems.  The topics were "Google Tools & Procedures for Solving Family History Mysteries," "Future Technology and Genealogy - 5 Strategies You Need," and "How to Reopen and Work a Genealogy Cold Case."  Great ideas and tips I can use right away!

Besides John's general session, Kelvin Meyers and Cari Taplin stepped in at the last minute to substitute for J. Mark Lowe, who was scheduled to do the other half of the general sessions before he got hurt.  Meyers' presentation was on church records, and Taplin shared an amusing case study about the family legend that she is related to Roy Rogers (she's not, at least not closely).

Otherwise - I decided this was the conference where I needed to learn more about DNA and genetic genealogy.  A few days before the conference, I was contacted by a match on my mother's autosomal DNA.  This one perked my interest because the match is along my mother's paternal, Lithuanian line - where I have a brick wall after my immigrant great-grandmother.

There was still room in one of  Debbie Parker Wayne's Friday workshops on "Incorporating Genetic Evidence into a Family Study," so I signed up!  I also attended the DNA track on Saturday afternoon, which had two more sessions by Wayne, one a more general overview and the other on using a free third-party tool called Genome Mate with autosomal DNA results.  Diahan Southard, Your DNA Guide, did the other presentation, on next steps after autosomal DNA testing.

So what was my take-away from all the DNA sessions?  I should probably go ahead and get a Y-DNA test for my dad (at least at 37 markers; I can always upgrade later), and a mitochondrial DNA test for my mom.  There's a brick wall along the direct maternal line (can't go further than my great-great-great-grandmother Leah Pickering there), and perhaps it would help.  I'm still trying to decide about mitochondrial DNA for my dad, as I'm not sure it would help with any brick walls there.

I also figured out who I need to test (mitochondrial DNA) to try to get some answers on my Lithuanian great-grandmother Elizabeth Benevičiūtė.  What I did *NOT* learn at the conference was how to ask my mother's first cousin (who lives in California and whom my mother has not seen in years) if she or her daughter have already tested, or if one would be willing to test!  Somebody needs to offer a session on how to do that. :)

I also hope I can convince my husband to do an autosomal test (as he is the oldest in his line) as well as a Y-DNA test.  His direct line great-grandfather John Gresham is a brick wall.

I also got some tips on how to use the autosomal test results I already have for my parents within AncestryDNA and FamilyTreeDNA.  I'm going to try those out, and maybe Genome Mate too.

The other great part of conferences is seeing people I know and meeting new ones.  At the general sessions (and at a number of the breakouts), I sat next to my mentor during library school (my practicum supervisor), Kathy Strauss, head of genealogy and special collections at the Emily Fowler branch of the Denton Public Library.  I also got to meet the Patient Genealogist, Devon Noel Lee.

© Amanda Pape - 2015 - click here to e-mail me.

Thankful Thursday: Report on #FGS2014 in San Antonio

This past Saturday, August 30, I attended the Federation of Genealogical Societies 2014 (#FGS2014) conference in San Antonio.  I would have liked to have attended the entire conference, but the fact that it fell during the first week of classes at my university (AND during the year we'd just completed a major library renovation creating a new learning commons) meant that getting work time off to go was not possible.

Fortunately, the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS)  and co-hosts, the Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) and the San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society, offered a special Saturday-only half-price rate of $49.99 to attend that day.  I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear five nationally-known speakers AND get the syllabus (464 pages!) with information from all the other myriad of sessions I could not attend, both Saturday and Wednesday through Friday.

I drove down to Austin after work on Friday and spent the night at my parents' home.  I got up before the sun on Saturday and made the 90-minute drive to the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center, arriving in time for the first (8:30 AM) session.

Here are the sessions I attended:

1. Elizabeth Shown Mills of Evidence Explained fame on Okay I "Got the Neighbors" - Now What Do I Do With Them? on the importance of searching with context

2. The Accidental Genealogist Lisa Alzo on Ten Ways to Jumpstart Your Eastern European Research (which provided some useful tips for tracking down my elusive Lithuanian ancestors)

3. Diving into Archives:  Uncovering ArchiveFinder and ArchiveGrid with FGS President and librarian D. Joshua Taylor (hopefully some of my workplace collections will be listed on ArchiveGrid soon!)

4. Beyond X & Y: Using Autosomal DNA for Genealogy with The Legal Genealogist Judy Russell, an entertaining and easy-to-understand explanation of the potential and limits to those DNA tests I did on Mom and Dad

5.  Tips for Finding Ethnic Origins at Ancestry with Julianna Szucs Smith of Ancestry.com - I'm hoping this will help me find some other elusive ancestors on passenger lists or in naturalization records.

Most of the gaps between the earlier sessions were 45 minutes long, allowing time to visit the exhibit hall.  In the first one, I got most of the ribbons to add to my FamilySearch-lanyarded name badge, as well as my cool blogger beads (with cowboy boots and cacti; badge, ribbons & beads pictured above), sponsored by MyHeritage.com (which, I learned from Lisa Alzo's session, might be a good site for me to join as they have a huge number of members from Lithuania).  I also ran into Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers, who I'd always wanted to meet.

I also got to meet Erin Roudabush with Family Chartmasters who had been working on a bowtie-with-descendants chart for my parents' upcoming 60th wedding anniversary (more on that in a future post).  I won a gift certificate from them at last year's TSGS conference, and had finally gotten around to using it.  

At the RootsMagic booth, I took advantage of a conference special and purchased three of their software products for less than the price of two (with the RootsMagic user manual thrown in for free) - since I need something to replace the now-unsupported PAF (free Personal Ancestral File) software and start a well-documented family tree offline.

I had lunch with my librarian friend Amy Coffin of the We Tree Genealogy Blog, Lisa Alzo, and Kathryn Doyle of the California Genealogical Society & Library at a great River Walk restaurant called Maria Mia Mexican Bistro, where I had an awesome mango salad with jicama, avocado, chicken, and cilantro lime dressing.  I enjoyed listening to these FGS conference pros talk.

This was my first national genealogy conference - hopefully it won't be my last.

© Amanda Pape - 2014 - click here to e-mail me.

Society Saturday: Going to #FGS2014!

image adapted from FGS2014 blog, to include my town!

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) and co-hosts, the Texas State Genealogical Society and the San Antonio Genealogical and Historical Society, have announced a SPECIAL Saturday-only half-price rate of $49.99 to attend that day, August 30, of the upcoming annual conference in San Antonio, Texas.

That one day has more than 35 lectures plus optional workshops and luncheons to choose from - decisions, decisions!

There are some great speakers that day that I've heard at previous conferences - Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems (who taught me tricks with Google Earth), Thomas W. Jones, Curt B. Witcher with Allen County [Indiana] Public Library, Susan Kaufman with the Houston Public Library's Clayton Center for Genealogical Research,  Debbie Parker Wayne (from whom I've learned a lot about DNA), Teri E. Flack (an expert on Texas county records), and James Harkins with the Texas General Land Office, who is conducting a two-hour workshop that Saturday

A number of bloggers I follow but have never met will also be speaking:  Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers, The Accidental Genealogist Lisa Alzo, The Photo Detective Maureen Taylor, and The Legal Genealogist Judy Russell, as well as well-known genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills of Evidence Explained fame.  Naturally, many of their Saturday sessions conflict with each other or with other sessions I'd particularly like to attend, such as Archives, Libraries and Institutions for Genealogical Researchers in Germany by Dirk Weissleder.

I had already planned to drive down to visit the FREE Exhibit Hall to see product demonstrations and presentations on one of the two stages, as well as visit vendors and exhibitors in their booths, so this half-price rate makes the day even better!  Register now, take a "day trip" and spend Saturday in San Antonio!

© Amanda Pape - 2014 - click here to e-mail me.

Motivation Monday: I'm an #FGS2014 Ambassador!

I was excited to learn last week that I have been honored to be named an Ambassador for the FGS (Federation of Genealogical Societies)' 2014 annual conference, to be held August 27-30 in San Antonio, Texas!

As an Ambassador, I will be helping "to spread information about the FGS 2014 Conference in San Antonio, Texas, August 27-30, through social media to their friends, colleagues, and everyone interested in genealogy."

I'm not even sure yet if I will be able to attend more than Saturday, August 30 (but I'll definitely be there then!).  I am the Coordinator for Archives and Special Services at the Dick Smith Library at Tarleton State University in Texas, and while "Special Services" does include our genealogy and local history collection, it also includes our "Curriculum Collection," which includes children's and young adult literature, teacher resources, and a collection of K-12 state-adopted textbooks, all of which are used by students studying to be educators in our teacher training programs.  Unlucky for me, as far as FGS is concerned, is that it falls during the first week of the fall semester. :(

I did apply to be one of the exhibit hall presenters.  My university is very supportive of faculty and staff making presentations, so if I am chosen that may earn me another day (Friday) at the conference.

I was fortunate enough to spend a summer living and working (as a park ranger at Mission San Jose) in San Antonio, and one of the things I will be doing over the next few weeks is sharing some information about the city, particularly some of the attractions that I think might be of the most interest to genealogists.  I have a number of old photos from my summer there, as well as earlier family visits (including ones by my mother with her parents and siblings), and I'll be building some of my posts around those photos.

© Amanda Pape - 2014 - click here to e-mail me.

Tuesday's Tip: Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization

Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems

I attended a presentation by Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems at the Texas State Genealogical Society conference last Friday.  I was impressed with Lisa's knowledge and enthusiasm, and I've subscribed to the premium content at her website, as well as purchased some of her books and DVDs, which I'm sure I'll talk about more in the future as I explore them.

Lisa's presentation was called "Get the Scoop on Your Ancestors with Newspapers." Lisa showed us some "cool tools" for finding old newspapers.  I'm just going to talk about one of them in this post, the Stanford Newspaper Data Visualization.

According to its website, "This visualization plots over 140,000 newspapers published over three centuries in the United States. The data comes from the Library of Congress' 'Chronicling America' project, which maintains a regularly updated directory of newspapers."  The site provides some great historical information about the evolution of newspapers in this country.

I use Chronicling America a lot, but was not aware of this cool tool you can use to find newspapers in a particular time and locations (and language).  There's a timeline slider bar at the top that you can use to slide to the era that interests you.  For example, here's how the map looks for 1887:

You can then pan and zoom in to a particular area, and when you click on one of the dots, you can see what newspaper(s) were published in that city or town at that time.  Here's an example for Stephenville, Texas, in 1887:

If I click on that dot, a red triangle points to it, and then I can click on (any one of) the title(s) that appear for that location and date:

When I click on "The Stephenville empire," I get the corresponding page from Chronicling America:

If electronic copies of the newspaper are available in the Library of Congress collection, this page will tell you (scroll down) , and provide a link.  If it's not available electronically here (keep in mind it may be available elsewhere), you can then click on the "Libraries that Have It" link to find out some (not necessarily all) of the libraries that may have that title in some format:

I'd caution users of this feature to also use WorldCat (for additional libraries that might have the newspaper), as well as to contact the library in question, to make sure they truly have the newspaper and the years you want.  Note just above that for Tarleton State University, where I work, the holdings were last updated in January 1988.  We actually have the newspaper on microfilm beyond 1917, albeit with numerous gaps in the early years.

In future posts, I'll write about some of the other tools Lisa showed us, as well as a cool way to use Google Earth in genealogy that she demonstrated before her talk. 

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

Motivation Monday: 2013 Texas State Genealogical Society Conference

I returned home yesterday from three brain-busting days at the Texas State Genealogical Society annual conference, held this year in Round Rock, which was an easy 15-minute drive from my 85-year-old parents' new home in Austin. 

So much useful information packed into so little time; my mind is 'bout to 'splode!  Since I am the Coordinator of Archives and Special Services at my library, and our archival collections include county records, I decided to attend a lot of sessions pertaining to that topic (since my employer did give me the time to attend the conference Thursday and Friday).  Here are just some of the sessions I attended (with descriptions taken from the conference speakers web page):

Susan Ball: Sinners and Saints: Genealogical Finds in Civil and Criminal Court Records -
Drawing on her abstracting work with the Tom Green County Court Docket, Susan discussed information that can be found in court records about ancestors and their activities.

Teri Flack: Unearth Your Ancestors Using Land and Property Records - While land records primarily prove ownership and transfer of real property, they also can provide the evidence needed to prove family relationships. Using case studies and original documents, this lecture provided an array of tools researchers can use to solve problems with land records.

Teri also presented on Overlooked and Underused Courthouse Records.  Most genealogists are familiar with the birth, marriage and death records found at the local courthouse, but they may not have thought to investigate the variety of other records located there. These records may establish births, marriages, and deaths when those specific vital records do not exist. This presentation showed what records to look for, how to locate them, and what to expect when you find them.

Lisa Louise Cooke, Get the Scoop on your Family History with Newspapers - I attended this session because we also have old issues of the Stephenville Empire-Tribune on microfilm, and many genealogists who visit our library use these as well as the county records.  I'll talk more about this session in tomorrow's post.

I also attended five sessions (four of which were on Saturday) by featured speaker Thomas W. Jones:

Special Problems II: Identifying Female Ancestors – Strategies for identifying wives and mothers in the absence of marriage records; laws regulating females’ land ownership, inheritance, and other rights that may yield genealogical evidence concerning them; tracking men to learn about women.  I have a few "brick wall" women in my family trees, and hopefully these ideas will help.

The Jones Jinx: Tracing Common Surnames  – This case study explained how missing, erroneous, and altered records were overcome to identify the parents of an orphan named Jones.  I learned research strategies I can use to solve my own common-surname problems (Smith, Jones, Moore, etc.).

Five Ways to Prove Who Your Ancestor Was – Case studies illustrated five ways—some (the last two listed) reliable and others (the first three listed) not—that genealogists “prove” an ancestor’s identity:

• using information provided by others; 
• using a single source; 
• following a chain of evidence; 
• correlating evidence from multiple sources; and 
• weighing conflicting evidence. 

I also learned how to use the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS).

Problem Solving with Probate – This session described the wealth of records created to distribute property after someone’s death and demonstrated how to use such records to identify and trace ancestors - definitely related to our county records at work.

Solutions for Missing and Scarce Records - I  learned strategies for overcoming research barriers caused by lost or destroyed records, poor record-keeping, or a simple lack of records.

I also attended two "round table" discussion sessions on Thursday evening.  TSGS Webmaster and incoming Director for Development Randy Whited led the Social Media Open Forum, where pages versus groups and privacy issues in Facebook was a big concern. TSGS incoming President John Wylie led a discussion on Ethics in Your Family History.  Topics included copyright, plagiarism, publishing personal information on living people or potentially embarrassing information on deceased relatives, and other issues family historians must address.

John Wylie's Ethics round table - photo courtesy Crystal Calbreath and the Texas State Genealogical Society

More to come tomorrow!

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

Advent Calendar: Christmas Shopping at the TSGS Exhibits

It's the annual Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories!  I've participated the past three years (2009, 2010, and 2011), and rather than simply re-post, I'm going to link to the older posts, and - when applicable - post about something else that's somewhat related.

Still running a little behind - the prompt for yesterday was:  December 19 – Christmas Shopping
How did your family handle Christmas Shopping? Did anyone finish early or did anyone start on Christmas Eve?

I've written about Mom's Christmas lists in previous years.  This year I'm going to write about some cool shopping ideas I saw among the exhibitors at the Texas State Genealogical Society conference in Fort Worth back on November 1-3.

The Paper Tree (with the cleverly named website GrillYourGranny.com) makes beautifully illustrated family trees, with up to 8 generations, for you to fill in and display.  They even have one tree you can have designed to order, with up to 7 generations, including children (up to 6) and grandchildren (up to 6 per child).  Some of the images are also available for purchase on CD, so you can use them on t-shirts or other items. 

Creative Family Tree creates custom family trees of different types that incorporate photographs or silhouettes - check out the arboretum!

Heritage Makers provides online software for making all sorts of keepsakes with your digital photos:

A neat idea I saw at this booth was a deck of heritage playing cards that had photographs and fun facts about various ancestors.

These three booths had some really neat stuff for Christmas shopping for any genealogy buff.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

The Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories (ACCM) allows you to share your family’s holiday history 24 different ways during 24 days in December! Learn more at  http://adventcalendar.geneabloggers.com.
 

Texas State Genealogical Society Conference - Day 3

Today I attended the third and final day of the Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) annual conference, held this year at the Riley Center in southwest Fort Worth.   Today's program consisted of four sessions by Curt Witcher, manager of The Genealogy Center of the Allen County (Indiana) Public Library (and also curator of the Rare and Fine Book Collection and their institutional archives).

Curt's first session was titled "An Ancestor's Death: A Time for Reaping," the point being that the potential for record generation is greatest at time of death.  One can glean an enormous amount of information and clues from obituaries, death notices, family Bibles, funeral home records and guest books, remembrance cards and service programs, church death records, monument company records, burial permits, cemetery plat maps, and of course tombstones, wills, and probate records. 

His second session was "Using Government Documents in Genealogical Research."  With our small collection of federal and state documents under my jurisdiction at work, I was interested in this session for work-related reasons.  Curt explained a little about the SuDoc system for organizing federal records (Texas uses a similar system for state documents), and discussed some indexes to them, both print and online.  He showed numerous examples of genealogical information that can be found in these records that go beyond the recording of births, deaths, and marriages.

The third session was called "Finding the World with WorldCat,' WorldCat.org being the largest bibliographic database in the world, online and free.  Being a librarian, I thought I was pretty familiar with WorldCat, but Curt provided some great tips for searching (for instance, add "family" after your surname and put both words within one set of quotation marks).  He also described a couple of features I did not know about (mostly because my use of WorldCat at work is primarily to look to see where the nearest library is that has the item I want that my library does not have, to determine if interlibrary loan is feasible).

One feature is the ability to create an account in WorldCat, and thus have a place to "store" your research record, create bibliographies and lists, and add notes, reviews, and tags to items.  Another feature (a result of creating an account) is the ability to add notes to items that might help future researchers - for example, the table of contents of a book, whether or not it's indexed by name or geographically, etc. - which can be particularly helpful if such information is not available in the bibliographic record.  Makes me want to do so with any unique item we might have in our genealogy collection at work (the local cemetery  transcriptions come to mind - listing which cemeteries are covered in which volumes).  Unfortunately, at the moment, any notes one adds aren't indexed and won't come up in WorldCat search results...maybe someday!

The final session of the day was called "Doing the History Eliminates the Mystery."  The description in the syllabus pretty well sums it up:  "an explanation and demonstration of how researching all the details of each ancestral family s well as the history surrounding the area can pay significant research dividends.  Histories of geographic areas, ethnic and religious groups, migration patterns, and occupations can provide the genealogist with important data as well as pointers to other information."

Curt said to pretend you need to write a 1000-word historical essay on a particular ancestor.  The first step is to focus on all the details of this single ancestor, by asking the journalist's who-what-when-where-why questions.  The second step is to focus analytical attention on all the documents that support the details of that particular ancestor - and he provided quite a long list!  He suggested setting up a matrix (pictured in the photo above) with local, state, and national along one axis, and published materials, unpublished materials, and government documents along another, and making sure you check locations that have each of these.

Step three is to evaluate the specific context in which you find your specific ancestor and ancestral family, followed by studying all the geographic histories of the target area.  Curt noted that the old fire safety adage "stop, drop, and roll" can be applied to geographic targeting:  stop your searching, drop to a specific geographic area where you found an ancestor, and "roll" around adjacent areas studying their history and looking for more relatives.

The final steps are to study all the ethnic histories that relate to your ancestor, and to check the neighbors, the topography, migration routes, and use timelines to place the ancestor/family in historical context.  Curt's presentation was illustrated by two detailed examples from his own family trees, and lots of suggestions for sources.

All in all, this was another brain-busting day in a mind-exploding conference.  I'm exhausted now, but I have lots of ideas on how I can improve access to genealogical and local history materials at work, and how to approach the brick walls in my own genealogical research.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

Texas State Genealogical Society Conference - Day 2

Today I attended the second day of the Texas State Genealogical Society (TSGS) annual conference, being held this year at the Riley Center in southwest Fort Worth.  Since I've recently been promoted at work to Coordinator of Archives and Special Services, and our archival collections include county records, I decided to attend a lot of sessions pertaining to that topic today (since my employer did give me the time to attend the conference yesterday and today).

Three of the five sessions I attended were by Teri E. Flack (pictured above), who is the chair of the TSGS Records Preservation and Access Committee, and the state's liaison to the same national-level committee.  I was especially interested in hearing her speak when I read in the program that she "volunteers at Texas State Archives on a project to preserve and make accessible to the public over 1,000 volumes of Galveston County Records from the 19th and 20th centuries."  Since my mother and I think her Guokas ancestors immigrated through Galveston, I'd love to know more about what's in these records.

The first session of Teri's I attended was called "Gone to Texas: Fundamentals of Texas Research."  This included a brief overview of the state's history with some pointers on how and why certain events affected settlement patterns and record-keeping.    For example, a state constitution adopted after the Civil War turned county government upside down, abolishing county courts (reinstated in 1876).  Delayed birth records came about due to the establishment of Social Security, as people needed to provide evidence of a date of birth for this program. This is (one reason) why you can find birth records for some people born in Texas prior to 1903, when the state began requiring birth records to be filed at the state level.  Teri talked about many other types of records available in Texas and where you can find them.

Teri was immediately followed by James Harkins, Director of Public Services for the Texas General Land Office Archives and Records Program.  He talked about "Genealogical Resources at the Texas General Land Office" - who should do research there, various land grant documents and how the land grant process worked, and what you might find among their various collections and maps.  He also demonstrated how to search their website, both for land grant information (and, in some cases, digitized images) and their mapping feature (which you can also use to find maps to purchase_.

I also attended Teri's session called "Dead Men Talking:  Finding Answers Using Probate and Estate Records."  Again, she went over the types of records that might be created in every step of the probate process, and where one might find them.  Both of the sessions were particularly useful to me, as I learned more about the county records I now manage, and how to help genealogical researchers find what they need.

The other presentation by Teri Flack that I attended, "Records:  Ensuring Preservation and Access," was really more of a group discussion than a presentation.  The Report on the Preservation of Historical Texas State Court Records, issued in August 2011 by the Texas Court Records Preservation Task Force, showed that many county officials don't know where some of these records are and/or what's in them.  Sometimes the county doesn't have the records (my university, a regional depository for microfilm records for a number of counties, also has, for example, many of the paper records for our local county, almost 400 volumes ranging from 1867 to 1967).  The group talked about some of the issues in preservation (loss through neglect, intentional destruction, theft, lack of funds, inadequate facilities) and access (privacy or security concerns, lack of staffing, misinterpretation of restrictions on specific records), and some of the things genealogists can do to help with these issues.  This was very enlightening.  Preservation of these records is important, not only for genealogy, but for Texas history too.

I rounded out my day with a session for my own edification (not work-related - I'll be making up for that with a session tomorrow).  I went to Debbie Parker Wayne's presentation on "Going Nuclear:  DNA Discoveries to Trace All Lines of Descent."  She is the director of the TSGS DNA Project.  She explained, in a clear, comprehensible manner, autosomal DNA testing and how the results can be used.  I knew very little about the use of DNA testing in genealogy and wanted to learn more, so this session was very helpful to me.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

Texas State Genealogical Society Conference - Day 1

Today I attended the first day of the Texas State Genealogical Society annual conference, being held this year at the Riley Center in southwest Fort Worth.  That's about as far from my home as my workplace is, so this was an easy drive for me.

I attended the (free!) librarians track, which opened with Curt Witcher, manager of The Genealogy Center of the Allen County (Indiana) Public Library (and also curator of the Rare and Fine Book Collection and their institutional archives) speaking on "The Best of Times - For Genealogists and Their Librarians."  Three takeaways from his talk:  1)  check out WeRelate.org, a "virtual vertical file" wiki, 2)  contribute your expertise on local area history and genealogical research to the FamilySearch wiki, and 3)  do at least two technology training programs at your library (I think he said per month).

Next was Sue Kaufman, current TSGS president and Manger of the  Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research of the Houston Public Library, whose talk was titled "Give 'Em What They Want:  Collection Development and Partnerships."  Regarding collection development, Sue said we don't have to have it all, but we need to know where to get it when our patrons need it.  Sue has also come up with some interesting (and successful) partnerships, including a clever one with the local animal shelter that ties animal pedigrees and human pedigrees (get it?).

I ate lunch with my practicum supervisor in library school, Kathleen Strauss, manager of the Special Collections Department of the Denton Public Library.  Afterwards, Sharon Perry Martin, former manager of the Dallas Public Library's awesome genealogy and Texas/Dallas history collections (she is now director of the University Park Public Library in Texas), described Dallas' unique collections and some of their organizational issues in "Is It Genealogy or is it History?  It's both!"  I could relate to this with the collections I manage.

Finally, Bill Buckner, manager of the Genealogy Center of the Waco-McLennan County Library, gave a very helpful talk called "Coping with the Ancestrally Challenged - Providing Service to Family History Researchers," with useful handouts and many tips.

There was also a (free) genealogy society leadership track today, as well as a morning and afternoon session on "Getting More from FamilySearch.org,"  ALSO FREE!  The latter will be repeated tomorrow (again, a morning session and an afternoon session, same thing in both), as well as a FREE "Getting Started" track tomorrow for beginning family researchers.  The latter will continue on Saturday.

It's also not too late to attend the paid sessions of the conference - walk-ins are welcome!  It's $45 per day or $75 for both days.  I'm looking forward to the sessions I'm planning to attend tomorrow.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

ALA RUSA "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" Preconference - part 5

The fifth and final presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) History Section's genealogy preconference at the Midwinter Meeting in Dallas on January 20 was by Sue Kaufman, Manager of the Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research of the Houston Public Library.  Her presentation about the Clayton Center, the "Gem of the Gulf Coast," was what I was most looking forward to when I attended this conference, since my mother's family has long (late 1890s) Houston roots.

I was happy to hear from Sue that anyone with a Texas drivers license can get a Houston Public Library card.  I will be in Houston in mid-April for part of the Texas Library Association conference, and I plan to spend some time after the conference ends on Friday and before I head home on Saturday doing research there.

Sue noted that their collection is physically organized by geography, but that Dewey Decimal numbers are in their online catalog.  She also said they now have at least one thing from every county in 30 states.  She also stated they have about 20 five-drawer cabinets of unindexed family files.  Fun!  I'll have to see if any of my kin are in those!

Here are a few other things Sue talked about that I'll be checking on my upcoming trip:

• Index to Texas naturalizations 1846-1939 on microfilm (looking for my immigrant great-grandparents and their siblings)
• Harris County marriages (lots of my relatives married there)
• Confederate pension applications (looking for a couple great-great-grandfathers in Louisiana here)
• New Orleans and other Gulf port passenger lists (those immigrant great-grandparents again)

Sue mentioned that the Clayton Library Center has a very active Friends group.  They gave the Center more money than it got from the city budget!  They also manage the original Clayton house (pictured in Sue's slide to the left) 40 hours a week.

The Clayton Center is now a partner with FamilySearch in a number of activities.  They particpate with other genealogical libraries in a program to digitize genealogy and family history publications in their archives.  They are now a microfilm affiliate site, meaning you can have microfilm from the Family History Library sent here.  They will also be assisting with indexing the 1940 census that will be released on April 2.  Other projects include digitizing Houston-area funeral home records and vaccination records.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

ALA RUSA "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" Preconference - part 4

The fourth presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) History Section's genealogy preconference at the Midwinter Meeting in Dallas on January 20 was by Aaron Holt, an Archives Technician with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Southwest Region in Fort Worth. Aaron, a 19-year veteran of NARA,  spoke on "Native American Holdings at NARA Ft. Worth, with Specific Emphasis on the Five Civilized Tribes - Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee."

Aaron's presentation was quite detailed, and he provided four handouts, including a list of the microfilm available at NARA Southwest.  Here are some interesting points from the presentation:

• Most Native Americans have a minimum of three names, and those names can change.
• NARA can't translate a Native American name.
• NARA can't add to or take away from the information in their files.
• "Indian Territory" varied over the years - most recently it is Oklahoma, earlier it was Indiana.
• 99.9% of Oklahoma Native American records, plus those of Texas' Alabama-Coushatta tribe, are at NARA Fort Worth.
• When doing Native American research at NARA, one of the first questions one is asked is the family's tribal affiliation.
• An "Old Settler" is a Native American who voluntarily went west in the 1820s rather than being forced to go later.
• The first Cherokees to move west settled in western Arkansas, then later in Oklahoma.
• The Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes are closely related, and members of those tribes may be found on each other's rolls.
• Some Native Americans practiced polygamy, so a female head of household on a census might be an additional wife of a man listed earlier.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

ALA RUSA "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" Preconference - part 3

The third presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) History Section's genealogy preconference at the Midwinter Meeting in Dallas on January 20 was by William Forsyth of Proquest on their genealogy/history database products for libraries.  Proquest sponsored this free preconference and provided yummy breakfast goodies and a delicious lunch.

Thanks to the TexShare Database Program, over 700 libraries in Texas have access to Proquest's Heritage Quest Online database, and to Texas maps in the Digital Sanborn Maps collection.  A number of larger public library systems have access to all the maps in the latter collection (as do some universities), as well as to the Ancestry Library Edition (NOT the same as Ancestry.com).

Heritage Quest has some unique content that's not in either Ancestry.  Its Genealogy and Local History Book Collection has over 24,000 family histories, local histories, and primary sources.  Because the database will mark "hits" in the book of your search terms, you can quickly scan though your results.

Many academic libraries (and some larger public libraries) subscribe to at least one title in Proquest Historical Newspapers.  My university subscribes only to The New York Times, 1851-2007, but I have used it often in genealogical research.  I was pleased to see that ProQuest has a clean new user interface, AND a new way to search obituaries and death notices directly.

It was interesting to hear about a couple genealogy products I was not aware of.  ProQuest Sanborn Maps Geo Edition has geocoded Sanborn maps (1867-1970) that are searchable by address and GPS coordinates. You can also overlay Sanborn maps with current maps (street, satellite, and hybrid layers) to see how an area has changed.  Currently, though, this is only available for certain cities in certain states, and Texas is not one of them.

Another new product to me was Historic Maps Works Library Edition, which is an exclusive distribution and development partnership between ProQuest and Historic Map Works.  The latter is a company that scans and uploads old maps and geocodes them to modern maps.  This allows users to search by modern day address or GPS coordinates (currently only available for 12 states, mostly in the northeast, via ProQuest). Users can also search by keywords, town names, map publishers, or year; or browse by geographic location through a point-and-click world map.

Below is an example (from the Historic Map Works site) of an Abilene 1885 Sanborn map (in color) overlayed onto a Google Map from today (on the left), and an enlargement of one city block overlayed onto a Google Hybrid (satellite and map, on the right):
















Forsyth demonstrated the use of some of these products with an interesting case study of his own:  his great-grandfather, Ellend Erickson, a Norwegian immigrant who served in the Union Army during the Civil War and was later elected to the Minnesota State Legislature.  The handout we got on Proquest is here.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

ALA RUSA "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" Preconference - part 2

The second presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) History Section's genealogy preconference at the Midwinter Meeting in Dallas on January 20 was by Ari Wilkins, a staff member at the Dallas Public Library and a principal with Black Genesis.  It was entitled "The Story Behind the Fountain Hughes Case Study - Cross Country Research."
Fountain Hughes was a former slave who was interviewed about his life by Hermond Norwood, a Library of Congress engineer at the time, in Baltimore, Maryland, in June 1949, when Fountain claimed to be 101 years old. The recording is one of only 26 in the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center's Archive of Folk Culture and is currently part of the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection.  Ari began her presentation by playing portions of the interview.
Ari decided to follow his life, documenting the places where he lived, and she used a variety of resources.  In the recorded interview, Hughes said he, his mother, and his father "belonged to Burnley" and that he was "born in Charlottesville, Virginia."  Working backward through census and other records, she verifed that he was owned by the Burnley family in Albemarle County, Virginia, which is the same county where Charlottesville is located. Using a tax record of the slave owner that documented his age, she determined that he was probably born around 1860, and thus he was about 89 when he was interviewed, not 101.

In the interview, Fountain Hughes said, "My grandfather belong to Thomas Jefferson," and "my father got killed in the Army" [in the Civil War].  It's not clear who Fountain's father was.  He may have accompanied a Burnley master in the war as a servant.  His grandfather was probably Wormley Hughes, who became the head gardener at Monticello, and whose mother was a sister to Sally Hemings.

She also found contact information for the sole surviving direct descendant of Fountain, using the Reference USA database.  She recorded an interview with her which she played for us.  Shallie Barrett Marshall remembered her great-grandfather living with the family when she was a child.

This was a fascinating case study, and Ari provided a handout listing resources for African-American and slave era genealogical research, including a list of misconceptions about such research.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.

ALA RUSA "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" Preconference - part 1

Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) History Section's genealogy preconference at the Midwinter Meeting being held January 20-24 in Dallas.  It was titled "Genealogy is Bigger in Texas" and ran from 10 AM to 5 PM at the Dallas Public Library. The preconference was free (thanks to sponsorship by Proquest, who also provided yummy breakfast goodies and a delicious lunch), but required preregistration due to limited seating.

The day was so chock-full of good information that there was barely time for bathroom breaks, let alone a visit to the Dallas Library's awesome genealogy and Texas/Dallas history collections.  In fact, the first speaker was Lloyd Bockstruck, who retired July 31, 2009, as supervisor of that genealogy section (where he served since 1973), on "growing a collection during harsh economic times."  My photo of Bockstruck is blurry, so I'm using one from his days as a genealogy columnist with the Dallas Morning News.  My mother clipped a number of his columns when my parents lived in Lancaster (a Dallas suburb) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she still has them in her files.

The only time I might have been able to tour the rest of the library was from 10 to 10:30 AM - but if I had, I might have missed out on winning a door prize, awarded by Michael J. Hall, Deputy Chief Genealogical Officer of FamilySearch.  My prize was the set of the first two volumes of Texas First Families Lineages (volume 3 will be published in November), a $60+ value that I'll be adding to my library's genealogy collection.

Other presenters were Ari Wilkins of Black Genesis on an African-American genealogy case study, William Forsyth of Proquest on their genealogy/history products, Aaron Holt from the National Archives in Fort Worth on their Native American holdings, and Sue Kaufman of the Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research of the Houston Public Library on their holdings and services.  Watch for blog posts on each of their presentations in the near future.

© Amanda Pape - 2012 - click here to e-mail me.