Third day of the 2016 NGS Conference

Mike and I stopped at a Burger King for breakfast this morning before taking me to the conference center for today's seminars.

My 8:00 seminar was "Reasonably Exhaustive Research, The First Criteria for Genealogical Proof" given my Elizabeth Shown Mills, CGL, FASG, FNGS, FUGA. She explained the difference between "search" and "research" and that the Genealogical Proof Standard had been changed in 2014 to "reasonably exhaustive research" instead of search. She covered the processes that we need to go through in our research. The second part of the seminar was a research project and the steps taken to prove and disprove some of the information from past researchers.

The next seminar was "Focus on Place: Building Locality Profiles for Your Research" by Joshua Taylor, MA, MLS. I have heard Josh talk on this subject before at one of our Valentine Seminars for the Indian River Genealogical Society. He is a lively and entertaining speaker and none of the other seminars in the 9:30 time slot really struck an interest in me. After my last seminar which was really an in depth and complicated subject, this one was a welcome change. I still learned some new pointers from Josh today. Basically his concept of a locality profile is the same as creating a timeline for location - county, state, country. We learned how and where to search and locate information on the locales that we were searching in.

The 11:00 seminar was given by Richard Sayre, CG, CGL, FUGA "Territorial Papers of the Southeast". This was really informative and Rick gave us some terrific printed sources for locating territorial papers and told us which ones were online and where to find them. This was really helpful since a lot of our ancestors' lived in areas that were still territories before they became states.

I've eaten a turkey wrap and a hamburger for lunch this week and really wanted something
different today for lunch, so I chose some comfort food - mac & cheese and a Pepsi - $7.00. I joined a table of other attendees and we talked about the seminars we had been to and the ones we still had to go to.

Lisa Louise Cooke as giving a 30 minute seminar at 1:15 at her booth and I headed over there and managed to get a seat. She talked about how to "Create Google Earth Map Overlays". She showed us how to take a plat map that had been scanned and overlay it on Google Earth to see where our ancestor's land was on a current map. There were a lot of steps and adjustments, but not all that difficult to do - just too many steps to include here.

I still had about 45 minutes after Lisa's seminar before my next one at 2:30, so I left the Exhibit Hall and found a chair out by the escalators and looked through my notes from this morning.

My 2:30 seminar was "Military Men, Pacifists and the Women They Loved: Tracking Down the Revolutionary War Generation" by Maureen A. Taylor. She covered the online sources for Revolutionary War records - the DAR and SAR websites, where to find pension records and how to find photographs of Revolutionary soldiers (these were taken when they were very old in the mid-1800's) - we forget how early photographs were taken.

My last seminar was "Siblings Matter: Using Siblings and Cousins to Solve Genealogical Problems" by Amy Harris, PhD, AG. She spoke about the importance of researching complete families not just our direct ancestors - which I have been doing. Sometimes it's impossible to find information on an ancestor, but we might find some information on the ancestor's siblings or other relatives that will lead us to information on our direct ancestor. 

I had written out my recipe for Pepper Steak yesterday and Mike prepared it in the crock pot today. It sure smelled good when Mike and I got back to Fletcher's house this afternoon from the conference center. Fletcher was already home from work and his friend Frankie was also there. All I had to do was put the rice on to cook and dinner was ready. I had gotten enough meat and vegetables for the Pepper Steak so that Fletcher would have leftovers after our dinner tonight.

Tomorrow is the last day of the genealogical conference and as much as I have enjoyed it, I'm glad that there is only 1 more day left!