GenealogyClassBlog

I will be presenting two programs at the Family History Fair in Pagosa Springs, Colorado on Saturday, August 14, 2010. This will be my first time ever to visit Pagosa Springs and I am looking forward to it — to a brief vacation there, to meeting the genealogists there, and to presenting two of my favorite lectures:

• How to Be a Power Hitter:  Improve Your Online Searching Skills
• Information Overload: Organizing Your Genealogy Records

My friend, Patricia Lee is one of the main organizers and a part-time resident of Archuleta County, Colorado. She will be presenting at the Family History Fair, too. Her lecture will be “Irish Family History Research.”

You can read more about this all-day event in the Pagosa Sun. There have been two articles:

Photo by John Fancher

July 14, 2010 “Pagosa to host Family History Fair” by Patricia Lee

July 22, 2010 “So, who do you think you are?” by Patricia Lee

For more information, or to register for this free Family History Fair, contact Sharron Oldham, the Director of the Family History Center in Pagosa Springs, or Barbara Ford, vice-president of the Archuleta County Genealogical Society.

Last July I presented a program for the Tulsa City-County Library on organization called, “Information Overload: Organizing Your Genealogy Records.” It was very well attended. Many people struggle with the mountains of paperwork, photos, computer files, and notes that we produce as we search for our ancestors, and so the topic is a popular one.

The Tulsa Genealogical Society has asked me to present a program on organizing, with a special emphasis on the paper records. I am scheduled for their March meeting, Monday, 15 March. Janet Cottrell teaches a free beginners class beginning at 6:00, and the meeting is from 7:00 to 9:00.

The monthly meetings are held the third Monday of the month (September through May), at the TGS Library, located in the southeast corner of the Briar Village Shopping Center, in a suite of offices behind what was once a Price Mart. Meetings are free and open to the public.

The address is 9162 E. 31st St. TGS has a web site: www.tulsalibrary.org.

Berwangen, Baden, Germany

I have been teaching myself to research using German genealogy resources for a while now. I have also been trying to learn to speak a little German and have learned to read some of the old Gothic print that was used in pre-World War II records. I have located and studied parish registers for Berwangen, the small town in Baden where my great-great-grandfather, John George (or Johan Georg) Mayer was christened in 1826. The parish registers were microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1978 and 1982, and so I have accessed them through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, by way of the New Haven Family History Center.

There are three Family History Centers in Tulsa now — two in churches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a new one at the Genealogy Center. While anyone can order genealogical records on microfilm for a reasonable price through any of the three, the Genealogy Center has also been collecting German resources in print which anyone can use to help locate small towns like Berwangen. The location of the records is closely tied to the place where your ancestor lived. I have learned to use both the multi-volume resource, Map Guide to German Parish Registers, a great new resource, and Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reichs, an important resource written in German, which was first published in 1913, and I’d like to explain the process of using both of these to anyone else who is interested.

Last spring I visited Berwangen. Although I didn’t actually do any genealogy research while in Germany, we met some wonderful people. The day that my daughter and I spent in Berwangen was the best day of our two-week trip around Europe. Before the trip, I learned to use maps on Google and while there we took pictures and video. Now that I have been there, I am anxious to learn more about the history of my ancestors in this town.

The Genealogy Center is located at 2910 S. Harvard in Tulsa. The free program will be in the Harmon Foundation Meeting Room from 2:00 – 3:30. I hope to see you there.

Bartlett-Carnegie Sapulpa Public Library Drawing by Russell Crosby

My topic will be “How To Be a Power Hitter: Improve Your Online Searching Skills,” one which is designed to help genealogists work around common problems found in indexes.

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The group meets in Frank Hall — a meeting room on the lower level of the Bartlett-Carnegie Sapulpa Public Library, 27 West Dewey Avenue, in downtown Sapulpa. Meetings begin at 10:00 a.m. and are open to the public.

Ancestry.com reported on its blog on Jan. 4 that they have added more variations of letters & wildcards that may be searched on its website. As long as three letters are included and you provide either the first letter or the last letter, it does not matter what letters you omit. You could search for MacAdoo or McAdoo or Mackado with the same search, by entering M*ado?, whereas previously you were required to enter the first three letters.This sounds exciting to me, and I am looking forward to try it out.

I’ll give this a try on Ancestry Library Edition at TCCL’s Genealogy Center tomorrow,too, to see whether this new feature is available on the library edition as well. At the Tulsa City-County Library, Ancestry Library Edition is available to library card holders at all branches in the system — for free.

I have been asked to present my lecture, “How To Be a Power Hitter: Improve Your Online Searching Skills,” for the new genealogy society in Sapulpa on February 2 at 10:00 a.m. This new development will necessitate some changes to the lecture. But I’ll be glad to do it. I think this is great news.

Read more at this link. And, I’d suggest reading the comments, too.