NGS 2012 Day 2: AM

Day 2 (Thursday) of the NGS conference began in a much nicer fashion than day 1: not much actual gridlock on the highway and I arrived in time for the first session, which was on BCG certification.  As this is on my 5 year plan, I thought I should get some basics.  I only stayed for the first half of the session (it ran through 2 session times), but learned a lot.  It is time to go through the manual with a fine tooth comb, up my research reports and work on friends research so that I can practice writing “client reports”.

After this, I headed to Indexes! Indexes! Indexes! How to Find People Who Don't Seem to Be There! with Elizabeth Shown Mills.  This was my first time seeing her speak and I was quite impressed by her presentation.  My favorite part was when she mentioned that “Cassell” can be indexed as “Cafell”, which I am hoping will help me with my Casell (but often spelled Cassel or Cassell) ancestors.

The best strategies she gave, in my opinion, was to use wildcards for vowels whenever possible and to consider ethnicity as a surname.  I never would have thought to look for Italian, Marco or German, Nicolas in my search, but if the person taking the information couldn’t understand or figure out the last name, they put it down like this, instead.  If you have had problems finding people in indexes (who hasn’t), I recommend purchasing this lecture CD.

I ended my morning by starting in a session, but by that 3rd hour of sitting, I had had enough, so I went to the expo to index the 1940 census and wander around.  I actually got so caught up in indexing (my favorite part was the indexer who put Long Island as a foreign country from the Bronx-indeed it sometimes seems like it is…), that I was a few minutes late to my lunch lecture.  I will write about this lecture and my afternoon sessions in the next post.

World Memory Project

I received this in an email today. A very important indexing project that I will be helping with. I hope you will join me.

"Imagine not knowing a loved one's fate for 65 years — and then finding the truth in a document you never knew existed.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has collected more than 170 million documents detailing the experiences of individual victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II. Now Ancestry.com is partnering with the Museum to create the World Memory Project, which allows anyone, anywhere to help make these documents searchable online for free — so more families can discover what happened to loved ones victimized by the Nazis during one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Here's how you can help.
You may have heard of the Ancestry World Archives Project, our established community that has spent years preserving historical documents and making them searchable online for free. The World Memory Project is using the same software and processes to build the largest free online resource for information about individual victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II.

Being part of the project is as simple as typing information from documents into searchable databases. Even just a few minutes of your time can make a difference.

We hope you'll join the World Memory Project in helping families discover missing relatives and facts about their past."

FamilySearch Indexing

I have been following DearMYRTLE's "Finally Get Organized" January 2009 checklist.  All of my papers in plastic sheet protectors and binders, so I went to the next step today and did my first extracting with FamilySeach Indexing.

It was much easier than I had anticipated, though I'm glad that there are two people indexing each page, just in case (some of the writing was a bit difficult to decipher).  I should be able to do this Thursday nights while watching Dear Betty.  It will be good practice for both transcribing records properly and deciphering different handwriting styles.  Besides, a little good genealogy karma never hurt anyone;-)