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T. actually went around telling people that it was a half day, and people believed him, because he is just relentlessly serious all the time. People totally believed him. Pretty funny! I did not actually put him up to it, but I sort of wish I could take credit for it. But nope, other than the shared genetics, this is not mine at all!
It was kinda believable in part because all the elementary schools do have a half day.
It was Gathering Day 1 of NERGC. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to connect, because the email with the link for the hub went to spam. I kept looking at the registration page, and failing to find it, and checking the newsletters, and failing to find it. I went to twitter; nothing there. I went to FB — because of course, that’s where middle aged women hang out so that’s where the info is. Once I understood the link was in an email from someone else and likely in spam, I had no trouble.
The first session I attended was ... not awesome. The one good bit was when Skip Duett was trying to talk about thinking like an archivist, and the woman running that session kept stopping him from explaining. *sigh*
The Alec Feretti session about working around problems in indexes was amazing (I love how he just wild cards every vowel in Italian names — how perfect is that!). He went through every trick I’ve ever used and then had as many more. It was wonderful.
Crista Cowan’s update on Ancestry was useful. Jill Morelli’s presentation on using unindexed datasets online was really good, altho very FamilySearch focused. This is more of the think like an archivist theme. In some ways, I wish she had come at it from the, hey, here’s how to use a finding aid, but this is not aimed at information science / librarian types, it is for hobbyist genealogists. Her pragmatic do this do this do this amounts to the same thing just with less of an framework for doing it in other contexts. I think what I want is an overview of which occupations / businesses / activities generated files historically (business, subdivided, government, ditto, etc. — so government would be split up by level of government and activity of government: state and tax, national and military, voting records at every level, blah blah blah) _and how they usually organize files_. Because there are a lot of within-space tendencies. Alpha gets you a really long ways, geography is important to make sure you are in an appropriate set, but if you are in an appropriate set and there is no index, it would be handy to understand typical non-alpha, non-geographical arrangements. Jane Wilcox is particularly amazing at this kind of presentation (from this year’s NYGB&S), but I am thirsty for more, and for a better overview. Yes, I know, I do know how to look up each individual one — if it exists — but I lack a well-developed framework in my head. Perhaps I should invent one!
Finally, Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s description of his experience of genealogy and using it in fiction was highly enjoyable.
I walked with M.
I did a loop by myself; it was cold.
It was kinda believable in part because all the elementary schools do have a half day.
It was Gathering Day 1 of NERGC. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to connect, because the email with the link for the hub went to spam. I kept looking at the registration page, and failing to find it, and checking the newsletters, and failing to find it. I went to twitter; nothing there. I went to FB — because of course, that’s where middle aged women hang out so that’s where the info is. Once I understood the link was in an email from someone else and likely in spam, I had no trouble.
The first session I attended was ... not awesome. The one good bit was when Skip Duett was trying to talk about thinking like an archivist, and the woman running that session kept stopping him from explaining. *sigh*
The Alec Feretti session about working around problems in indexes was amazing (I love how he just wild cards every vowel in Italian names — how perfect is that!). He went through every trick I’ve ever used and then had as many more. It was wonderful.
Crista Cowan’s update on Ancestry was useful. Jill Morelli’s presentation on using unindexed datasets online was really good, altho very FamilySearch focused. This is more of the think like an archivist theme. In some ways, I wish she had come at it from the, hey, here’s how to use a finding aid, but this is not aimed at information science / librarian types, it is for hobbyist genealogists. Her pragmatic do this do this do this amounts to the same thing just with less of an framework for doing it in other contexts. I think what I want is an overview of which occupations / businesses / activities generated files historically (business, subdivided, government, ditto, etc. — so government would be split up by level of government and activity of government: state and tax, national and military, voting records at every level, blah blah blah) _and how they usually organize files_. Because there are a lot of within-space tendencies. Alpha gets you a really long ways, geography is important to make sure you are in an appropriate set, but if you are in an appropriate set and there is no index, it would be handy to understand typical non-alpha, non-geographical arrangements. Jane Wilcox is particularly amazing at this kind of presentation (from this year’s NYGB&S), but I am thirsty for more, and for a better overview. Yes, I know, I do know how to look up each individual one — if it exists — but I lack a well-developed framework in my head. Perhaps I should invent one!
Finally, Nathan Dylan Goodwin’s description of his experience of genealogy and using it in fiction was highly enjoyable.
I walked with M.
I did a loop by myself; it was cold.