GenealogyClassBlog

Christine Rose, CG, CGL, FASG

When a snow storm on the morning of 28 March caused the Tulsa City-County Library to close all of its locations, the genealogy workshop being held at Hardesty Library had to be cancelled after the lunch break. Christine Rose, CG, CGL, FASG had presented two of four planned lectures and those of us in attendance were sorry to have to miss the remaining two. Christine is an excellent speaker and has extensive experience with courthouses and with teaching and lecturing.

Kathy Huber, Genealogy Librarian, arranged to have Christine return this Saturday, 17 October, to present those two lectures plus two more. The day’s topics will be:

• “County Land Records”
• “Using Little-Known Sources”
• “Leaping to Erroneous Conclusions” and
• “Solving Problems in 25 Hours or Less.”

The day’s workshop begins at 9:30 am, at Hardesty Library in the Redbud Auditorium, with two morning lectures and two more after a lunch break. After time for questions, the workshop will conclude at 4:00 pm.

When she was here in March, attendees had the opportunity to purchase some of the books she has written. Possibly this will be true again on Saturday. TCCL has some in its collection, including some that may be checked out. Check the Catalog.

One of my very favorite professional genealogists is Christine Rose, CG, CGL, FASG. Christine presented a workshop for the Tulsa Genealogical Society in 2005. She has served on the faculty at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University, and has presented numerous lectures at national conferences. You can read more at her website. She will presenting lectures at the Federation of Genealogical Societies’ 2009 Annual Conference to be held in Little Rock, Arkansas, 2-5 September.

A knowledgeable and experienced researcher, Christine specializes in courthouse research, spending several months on the road every year with her husband Cecil, doing professional research and studying Rose families all over the country. She is fun and positive, yet takes genealogy and the study of evidence very seriously. She co-authored Complete Idiot’s Guide to Genealogy, with Kay Ingalls, CG, an excellent how-to genealogy book. She also wrote, Genealogical Proof Standard, which I described in the mini-workshop I presented to the Tulsa Genealogical Society last May. It explains the process genealogists should use to reach conclusions. The Tulsa City-County Library is purchasing copies which library card-holders will be able to check out — one for Martin Regional Library and the other for Hardesty Regional Library.

Mark your calendar for 28 March, 2009, from about 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. The presentations will be free and open to the public, at the Hardesty Regional Library near 93rd & Memorial in Tulsa. Christine will be presenting four lectures, two before and two after a long lunch break, but the exact timing or order has not been set:

• Addicted to Courthouses!
• Estates:  a Goldmine!
• Court Records:  The System and It’s Records.
• Solving the Problem in 25 hours or less

CG, for Certified Genealogist, and CGL, for Certified Genealogical Lecturer, are service marks of the Board for Certification of Genealogists. She is also a Fellow, American Society of Genealogists.

Kathy Huber, Genealogy Librarian at the Tulsa City-County Library’s Genealogy Center, will be presenting a 2-1/2 hour workshop on Saturday, 31 January, to help students learn to begin the search for their ancestors. Kathy’s program will be 10:30 am to 1:00 pm.

Mark your calendar, too, for another TCCL genealogy program on Saturday, 21 February, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm. Liz Walker, Library Associate, will present a program on Free Genealogy Web Sites. The description says that she “will show you some useful free genealogy Web sites to help you with your family search.

Both events will be in the Harmon Foundation Meeting Room at the Genealogy Center, 2901 S. Harvard, in Tulsa, are free and are targeted to adults. No reservations are required.

Two Saturdays ago I presented a program on Genealogy Software for the Tulsa City-County Library. To those who attended, I handed out a checklist that I’d created to use while comparing various genealogy software solutions. There are many factors that need our attention when we try to choose a program or other solution for organizing our genealogical data or in networking with others. As I had prepared what I was going to say about features to compare from one solution to another I realized that my students would need a place to make their notes about what they’d found. I suggested that they watch for whether the web site of the product was helpful and attractive, whether a demo version was available, whether there was a users forum or access to technical support. Not only is price important, but so is platform, version, and format. I also suggested that each person might be able to define some capabilities that would be deal-breakers for them, such as whether the solution could output onto large charts, whether it could handle multimedia, and whether their genealogy data could be transferred with little or no hiccups from their cousin’s computer to theirs. I hope that this checklist will be a useful tool for making those comparisons.

I am making the Genealogy Software Comparison Checklist available in .PDF format, and I am also removing the file I had previously uploaded, which was created in Microsoft Office 2003 (for Windows). Feel free to download this for personal use. You may need Adobe Reader to open the file (unless you have a Mac, and then Preview will do it for you). You can download Adobe Reader at http://get.adobe.com/reader/. I hope there are no compatibility issues with this one, so I’d like to hear about any problems that I might be able to correct, or any suggestions as to how the content could be improved.

And for those who attended the program, thanks for coming! Any success with finding a genealogy software solution?

I will be presenting a program for the Tulsa City-County Library’s Genealogy Center on Saturday, January 10 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The topic is Genealogy Software — what it does, how genealogists use it, and how to select a new genealogy software program. See the library’s description and find information about how to find the library at their Event Guide listing: http://www.tulsalibrary.org/eventguide/oeg.asp?Keyword=Genealogy

I have a link to the handout material, which is a list of the relevant links to helpful web sites, on the home page of my web site: http://www.desktopgenerations.com. As of today, the handout is much the same as it was when I prepared it for the same program I presented in July 2008, but I’ll be updating it this week.

The address of the Genealogy Center is 2901 S. Harvard. Their hours on Saturday will be 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.