Genealogy on the Cheap: Another Book Sale!

A side benefit of signing up for newsletters is getting sale notifications in your email. Another genealogical publisher is having a Labor Day weekend sale. Genealogical.com, home to the Genealogical Publishing Company (GPC), is having a 30% off sale online! I have bought books from them and was quite pleased with both the books and the service.

GPC publishes many original works on how to do genealogy research, such as "Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace" by the redoubtable Elizabeth Shown Mills, as well as more abstruse volumes of genealogical data like the newly published "Abstracts of the Debt Books of the Provincial Land Office of Maryland, Charles County. Volume I" by Vernon L. Skinner, Jr. Their emphasis is on early American genealogy, especially the colonial and federal periods.

Their CDs contain multiple reference-type books per disc, often going into great detail on a single topic. For instance "Huguenot Settlers in America, 1600s-1900s" contains electronically searchable text of the pages of sixteen Huguenot reference works.

An interesting and useful feature of the web site is the Name Search, where you can search for people by first and last name. They have name-indexed about half of their 2000 publications, and you get back a nicely formatted list of books and CD containing reference to the searched for names. For some volumes a list of the surnames included is printed right on the web page, giving you an idea of how relevant the book or CD will be to your research. Would that more publishers would follow suit!

Genealogy on the Cheap: Book Sale!

Who doesn't love a sale on one of their favorite things? How about two favorite things? Whilst searching online for a genealogy book I had heard about, I discovered a 20% off sale at Family Roots Publishing:

"Celebrate both Labor Day Weekend and Leland & Patty's 45th Wedding Anniversary!"
http://www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com/

Patty and Leland Meitzler are the owners of Roots Family Publishing, and they have a huge  selection of genealogical goodies. I saw this for myself in person at their large, well-stocked booth at the Federation of Genealogical Societies convention last week. They seemed to stock every book about genealogy that I had ever heard of, plus a whole lot more I hadn't.

A good many of the titles are directly published by Family Roots Publishing, including a large series called "Map Guides to German Parish Registers", consisting of 43 volumes out of a projected 57.  Beyond books, there are lots of forms to help you organize your research, reprints of magazine back issues, and a smattering of other types of roots searching necessities. They also have a staggering 129 listings for products by genealogical stalwart William Dollarhide!

Until today I hadn't realized that the blog which I read occasionally, "GenealogyBlog: The free daily online genealogy nautamagazine" is written by the Family Roots Publishing duo. Among still other activities, they produce the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour, which sounds like a wonderful research opportunity!

My First Genealogy Conference

Sunday night I returned from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference, FGS 2013: Journey Through Generations. Wow! I'm still trying to absorb and organize all the great information I gleaned during the week, and all the literature I picked up at the Exhibit Hall.

Blogging during the conference sounded like a good idea before I got there, but once I was in the thick of it, I was too busy, too overwhelmed, and by the end of each day, too exhausted to make much sense. Even after a margarita. Instead I'm taking a retrospective approach, and discussing a few conference-related topics in the next few posts.

Should You Attend A Genealogy Conference?

My criteria for attending my first conference were:

1.     have I been working at genealogy long enough to gain from the conference?
2.     how far away is it?
3.     what will it cost me?

I began genealogy last February, and when the Ohio Genealogical Society had their annual meeting right here in Cincinnati in April, I decided #1 was a "No". I couldn't justify spending about $150 for a brand new hobby when there was so much free material online and in library books. However, I did spend 2 hours in the Exhibit Hall, which was free and open to the public. I got a discounted subscription to "Family Tree Magazine," asked techy questions about the RootsMagic software, saw a demo of the FlipPal personal scanner, and generally nosed around looking at literature, books, etc. Definitely worth the $4 parking fee!

Now after 6 months of reading and researching online, I spotted the FGS 2013 opportunity and felt I could learn a lot at a big conference. The venue was only a 3 hour drive north of Cincinnati, and driving is my preferred low cost mode of transport.

So then the hardest question: could I afford this? The conference fees were about $190 for 4 days. Hotel? Well, I'm a Motel 6 kind of person, and Fort Wayne's Motel 6 had a weekly rate of $27/day. I decided to make this my main vacation for the year, plus the business conference I used to attend in July was discontinued so I was saving money there. Yes, I registered!

For my future conferences, I would change the first criterion to "What can I gain from this conference?" Various types of conferences, meetings, and workshops are held all year long, lasting from one day to a week. The levels of education vary, too.

How long did you wait to attend a genealogy conference? Please chime in below in the comments!

Cheesehead Meets Cheeseman

It all started innocently enough, as many addictions do. After moving to Cincinnati, I kept hearing about Findlay Market, the old-fashioned public market with food vendors, a farmers' market, and a great street scene ambiance. I finally checked it out and, being a Wisconsin girl and lover off all things dairy, I immediately noticed the cheese shop. The Gibbs Cheese Shop!

Eventually I met the owner, Jeffrey Gibbs, and we started talking about our families. His Gibbses go back 200 years in Southeast Indiana, while mine have been in Wisconsin for nearly that long. Suddenly I remembered a story I heard growing up, about how the Gibbses were bitter over losing out on a large inheritance because the courthouse back east had burned down and they couldn't prove the relationship. Jeff just looked at me and said "I heard that same story growing up." A moment of stunned silence ensued, right out of some movie.

Trying to discover if we were indeed related, I looked into online genealogy research, and completely fell for it. My first career was medical research and my second was computer programming, so online research is right up my alley! Thus my life veered off, down the Rabbit Hole of Genealogy.

Hello, world

"Hello, world"

OK, so that marks me as a computer programmer geek, at least an old-style computer programmer geek. From time immemorial, or perhaps the 1960s, this was the classic first line a geek-in-training instructed the computer to print on the screen. Sort of announcing ones arrival into Geekdom.

Today I am officially joining the blogosphere. Despite 13 years as a software programmer/designer, then 11 years of running a web-based business with handcrafted web pages, and 2 years of tweeting, I have avoided blogging. What did I have to say personally or have time to say professionally?

Then I fell down the Rabbit Hole of Genealogy...

So here I am, to blog about my family research, sharing the adventure and some tips, hoping to find some relatives, and learn a lot.