IGHR-Day 3

Today was by far the toughest day yet. The morning started out pleasant though. Our first lecture was given by Elissa Scalise Powell on Compiling Source Materials For Publication. The point being that your writing needs to be presented in a way that is clear and makes sense to the reader.

John Colletta took over for the next session, Principles of Good Writing and Good Storytelling. I can't think of anybody who is more capable of giving a lecture on this topic. He doesn't focus as much on giving technical writing advice, but just as important is breathing life into the story. Making it engaging for the reader.

Then the afternoon sessions. We had back to back sessions with Tom Jones about Organizing Your Ancestors in Genealogical Formats. My head was spinning afterwards and I'm not sure it has stopped. Tom showed us how to use the genealogical superscript, the NGSQ format and the Register format. Whenever you read a genealogical piece of writing and you see all of those tiny numbers between names, then numbers and roman numerals next to names -- that is what he taught us. I don't think anybody was disappointed to see this particular session end.

After dinner I attended an evening lecture given by Paul Milner called Genealogical Wikis: A Personal and Customizable Research Tool. This lecture was enjoyable just to listen to Paul's Scottish brogue. In this lovely brogue he discussed the FamilySearch Wiki, Ancestry.com Wiki, WeRelate, and a few others.

Finally time for the homework. I buddied up with a fellow classmate (two tired brains are better than one) and we muddled through it together. We spent hours hashing out this assignment in the library and I think we have something that we won't be embarrassed about tomorrow. Now I'm off to get six hours of sleep and start this whole crazy process over tomorrow.