Monday, June 13, 2011

IGHR-Day 1

On Sunday I drove down to Birmingham, which was an uneventful and pleasant drive. Once here I went through the whole registration and checking in routine. This always takes longer than I think it will. The exciting part of the day was attending the ProGen study group gathering. I met Angela McGhie who coordinates and runs the whole program, and one of my fellow group members.

Today, Monday, was sunny bright and hot. Tom Jones' writing class started at 8:00 a.m. and the theme for today was footnotes. Perhaps not a scintillating topic for some, but it is very important to genealogical writing. The point being if I cite my sources properly and well, five generations from now my descendants will not have to do the amount of work that I currently am.

We also had a session from Elissa Scalise Powell called Write As You Go! The premise of this session was not to wait until you have completed your research to write it up, do it along the way. This is a weak area for me and one that I really must focus on in the future. After all, the notebooks, binders, and file folders will mean nothing unless I put it all together in a narrative format. Write your family history!!

Finally, we got to the portion of the day regarding homework. The assignment tonight is time consuming and hair pulling. We have ten sources that we need to write 3 different types of citations for... each.  Technically that is 30 citations. From what I understand this isn't even the heavy homework night. Yikes!

The highlight of my day was having dinner with Dear Myrtle. I really enjoy reading her blog and it was such a pleasure to meet her. I'm still excited about it! I wish I could have talked to her more, but we were all attending the evening lecture on Google Earth, presented by Rick Sayre and Pamela Boyer Sayre. This lecture was amazing! They showed how to take old maps (such as Sanborn Maps) from the 1800s and overlay them onto Google Earth. By doing this, you are able to compare the property your ancestor lived on back in the day, to present times. It was pretty cool.

Overall, a very full first day. Now I have to tackle my homework and somehow get enough sleep to pay attention for tomorrow. Oh boy.

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