GenealogyClassBlog

I think that we are going to have a great class this year. I enjoyed getting to know you during class, and then reading your student profiles after class. It was interesting to see what your interests are. I will be using the information to help develop the direction of the rest of the course.

I have located the details about the webinar scheduled for this Monday at 6:00 CDT. The Friends of the National Archives-Southeast Region is making this available for free. They describe webinars as “a Web-based seminar, lecture, or presentation delivered via the Internet. Audience my register and attend (using their computer) from the comfort of their home.”

The speaker will be Meg Hacker, Archival Operations Director at the Southwest Region in Fort Worth. There is a link to register on this website:  http://friendsnas.org/webinarSch.htm. Her topic will be “Researching Records Relating to the Five Tribes of Oklahoma… made a little bit easier.” A large portion of the federal records for the Cherokee, Muscogee/Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes may be found in the National Archives – Southwest in Fort Worth, Texas, and trying to use them can be confusing. Some have been microfilmed and are available at various libraries and archives; some have been digitized and are available online; others have not been filmed, digitized, or indexed and can only be used in person.

Meg is a fun and engaging speaker and is an expert on this topic. I encourage you to register and check out the technical details at the site, where I found the following system requirements:

PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Attendees will be able to ask questions, but will need to have a microphone (and they recommend a headset) to do so. It has been my experience with other webinars that you will not need to have a voice in their forum – you can simply listen. There are more webinars scheduled for the months ahead. If you aren’t interested in this topic, you might make a note of their later webinars.

I have updated the Genealogy Bibliography – the one that I told you to bring back each week – and you can download the updated file here – Bibliography11, and then print yourself a new one (but the one you picked up on Wednesday will be fine). I added Marsha Hoffman Rising’s book, The Family Tree Problem Solver, which is one of the books I mentioned in class available at the Tulsa City County Library.

I also added links to the Association of Professional Genealogists (www.apgen.org) and the Board for Certification of Genealogists (www.bcgcertification.org). And I replaced the URL for this blog with the new one – www.genealogyclassblog.com.

Remember to subscribe to the blog posts using the box at the left, and then you will be sent an email by Feed My Inbox – probably the next day. Or, if you have a blog reader (and you know how to use it), you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

See you next Wednesday!

“Genealogy: Beyond the Basics” is the title of the upcoming class at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church’s School of Continuing Education this time. Over the years that I been teaching genealogy classes at Boston Avenue (since 1994) I have changed up the format maybe five times. This time I would like to help the students explore, with an “experienced guide,” what they might find, “beyond the basics.” Here is the course description:

“After a quick review of how to begin the search for your family history, we will earn together how to build your skills and how to locate some of the newest and best resources. We will also explore genealogy software, online resources, and DNA testing; all while communicating outside of class on the Genealogy Class Blog. Basic understanding of your computer and the Internet is a must.”

The school will begin on Wednesday, 5 October and last five weeks through 3 November. See more information about other classes offered in a downloadable booklet at Boston Avenue’s website. The $15 fee covers a whole day of interesting classes, but the Genealogy: Beyond the Basics class itself will be from 2:30 to 3:30 pm every Wednesday. To register, call 918-583-5181.

Boston Avenue Church

It’s time again for the School of Continuing Education at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. My five-week genealogy classes will move from their usual Tuesday evenings to Wednesday mornings, from 9:30 to 10:30 and from 10:45 to 11:45. Registration for the school is $12.00, and includes all of the classes you can take for that same price. Other classes are listed in the brochure or in the church newspaper, available at BostonAvenue.org.

Genealogy classes are in two different series — one to learn the basics and the other to pick up particular topics in a lecture format. All five of these are programs that I have presented locally, including two that I presented at the 2009 Federation of Genealogical Societies National Conference. Here are the specific titles:

GENEALOGY:  FAMILY HISTORY BASICS  9:30 – 10:30 am

Oct 6 – Important First Steps
Oct 13 – The Census
Oct 20 – The Family History Library
Oct 27 – Court, Land & Military Records
Nov 3 – Tour of Internet Resources

FIVE GENEALOGY TALKS  10:45 – 11:45 am

Oct 6 – How Do You Know? Understanding Evidence and Citing Your Sources
Oct 13 – How to Be a Power Hitter: Improve Your Online Searching Skills
Oct 20 – What’s New at FamilySearch®?
Oct 27 – Oklahoma Settlement:  Territorial Homestead and Allotment Records
Nov 3 – Deutsche Vorfahren:  German Ancestors

For more information call Boston Avenue at 918-583-5181 or visit the church’s web site at www.bostonavenue.org/newspaper.shtml and download the newspaper from 24 September 2010.

The new year of genealogy classes at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church has begun. I am again teaching five weeks of classes, with two different courses scheduled each Tuesday evening. The first is called “Genealogy:  Family History Basics” and meets from 6:30 to 7:30. And the second session, which is designed to complement the first (and give me a place to enhance and improve genealogy lectures), is called “Five Genealogy Talks,” and meets from 7:45 to 8:45.

The topic of last Tuesday’s first hour was “Important First Steps.” The class members and I introduced ourselves to each other and we discovered that most of class consisted of beginners, who are just starting out. We have a mother-daughter couple and a grandmother-granddaughter couple, but no husband-wife couples this time.

The second hour was made up of almost the same group of students. The topic for the week was, “How Do You Know? Understanding Evidence and Citing Your Sources.”

I plan to post some more details about each of these sessions very soon.

Next week’s first hour topic will be “The Census,” about one of my favorite genealogy resources. This is a resource that many beginning genealogists can use, but that experienced genealogists use as well. Ancestry.com, and some other commercial and private sites, offer access to the digital images of the United States Federal census or to transcriptions of the contents of the census. We’ll learn what the census contains and about how we can access it.

The second hour’s topic will be “Information Overload:  Organizing Your Genealogy Records.” We’ll learn about how to organize the names, dates, places and relationships, as well as how to organize research plans and notes, and how to organize the stacks of paperwork genealogists seem to generate.

Welcome, former students and friends, to my new blog!

I wanted a place to post the interesting news and tips that I can’t share when there is no class in session. Of course, when class is in session, not all of my students can attend, and so I’d like a place to communicate what I’ve found or what I’d like to pass along. This blog will be like a bulletin board in the sense that you can come check it to see what is new. Sometimes it’ll be more like a chalkboard, where I can write what I’m trying to teach.

I’d like to hear from you about what you’ve been doing to continue the pursuit of your family’s history. I hope that you’ll want to leave a comment, but I have two reservations. First, this blogging is new to me and I’m not sure how much of a problem I’ll have with spam comments. I’ve set up the blog so that I can moderate the comments before they appear on the blog, so you won’t see your comment until I’ve had a chance to ok it (a little like grading papers).

My second reservation is that I don’t think I’ll be able to respond to all of the comments. I hope you won’t be discouraged from writing comments. Your comments will be just as much for the other readers of this blog as they will be for me — just as we did in class.

You may remember from class that I like to inform as well as to instruct. There are things happening in the broad genealogy community and in Tulsa and in Oklahoma, just since the most recent genealogy class at Boston Avenue ended on November 4, 2008. I look forward to having a cyberclass with whom to share things I hear, read, or learn.

I hope you can come back again and again.

Best Regards,

Barbara