I have posted slides from a couple of my RootsTech 2020 talks on Slides and Presentations

Or you can download them here:

•   Cluster Genealogy Booth Talk (PDF)
•   Discovering Your Family History in Newspapers.com (PDF)

Thanks for coming to the classes!

I will post the Civil War slides tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who came to the talk today. You can download the slides: Cluster, Huddle, or Flock

Funny how things sometimes turn out different than you plan.  Thursday I was supposed to give my Research Guides presentation at RootsTech 2018, but a flu bug decided he had other plans for me. 😦  Fortunately, my Ancestry colleague and friend Juliana Szucs stepped in and saved the day giving the presentation.  You can find the slides at Research Guides: Everything But the People  I am forever grateful to her.

On Friday, I managed to pull it together, and gave my Cluster Research presentation to a full room of enthusiastic conference goers! You can find my slides at Using Cluster Research to Understand Your Ancestors

Thanks to everyone who came to the lectures and many thanks to Juliana for covering for me!

I’ve also updated my Slides and Presentations page.

Note:  These are big PDF files, so give them time to download!

I’m preparing for my RootsTech talk Research Guides: Researching Everything But People.  If you are at RootsTech, the talk is at 4:30, March 1st in room 250A

I’m going to show you how to gather bits and pieces of information so that you can create a research guide about places that will remind you where to look and hopefully inspire you a bit.

First we will start with the basics and they should be the same for every state, more or less.  You will want to find links or information about:

• State Archive
• State Library
• History for the State
• State Genealogy Society
• State Historical Society
• State GenWeb Page
• Ancestry Wiki
• FamilySearch Wiki
• Cyndi’s List
• Ancestry Research Guide
• State Historical Markers

Not every state will have all of these, but most will.

Replace all of these prompts above with the link and then create a blog page, a OneNote or Evernote page or a word document so that you can access it again.  You can check out Virginia  Resources, North Carolina Resources and South Carolina Resources to see what I have done.

One of the many great things about writing a blog about your ancestors, is you sometimes find family members who have something to share with you.  And every time it happens, it fills me with delight.  If you’ve been following  me since the beginning you might remember my article about the 8 Payne children who were living without their parents: How Eight Children Ended Up Living Alone In 1930

I wrote that article almost 6 years ago.  And this year, courtesy of a newly found cousin, Robert Payne, I received this:

From left to right, in order of age: Otto, Eva, Daisy, Robert, Thomas, Floyd, Jennie, Jack and Lela.

Sadly, Eva passed away two days ago at the age of 98, the last of this generation.  The expressions on their faces make me smile.  And I’ve never seen a picture of my Grandmother Jennie when she was so young.

And then Robert sent me this picture of James Robert Payne and Georgia Eva Baxter Payne, the parents of the 9 children above.

I’ve never seen any pictures of my great grandparents.  If you belong to the group of us who have very few pictures to pour over and catalog, you know how delightful and meaningful these two pictures are to me.

Some days are better than Christmas. 🙂