Where have I been since March?
Well, I taught two Genealogy 101 classes (with slightly different curricula), spoke at six genealogical society meetings, and co-chaired a conference attended by nearly 200 people. Whew!
Now I’m a little more than halfway through an odyssey combining business and pleasure. It started in Madison, Wisconsin, in early May with a visit to the Wisconsin Historical Society‘s wonderful library and the Wisconsin State Archives. My husband and I were researching some of his Wisconsin ancestors. On Sunday, when the library was closed, we drove out to the Town of Vermont, located between Black Earth and Mount Horeb, where we succeeded in locating the cemetery where some of his ancestors were buried, and drove past the site of the Mackin family farm.
Too soon, I left to attend the National Genealogical Society‘s conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, preceded by the Board for Certification of Genealogists’ Education Fund Workshop. This year’s workshop was presented by Tom Jones and Melinde Byrne on writing and editing. Melinde presented us with some great prework–an unedited article submitted to a genealogical journal. Our mission was to reduce each paragraph to one sentence, then to summarize the entire article in one sentence. My version shrank from thirty-some pages to eleven pages. Since, as is the case with much unedited work, it was occasionally difficult to grasp the intended meaning of the article’s paragraphs, constructing summary sentences was a challenge!
After leaving Cincinnati, I spent some time with friends and family in Pennsylvania and New England and attended my 40th college reunion. We managed to steal part of a day at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston during that period.
Tomorrow it will be time to head south to Birmingham, Alabama, for this year’s Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, where I will be attending Paul Milner’s English research course.
Jun052012
