As I promised in my first post on this thread, here's a thumnail summary of the seminar I attended yesterday.
I had thought the seminar was going to be on Timelines and Internet Research Techniques; actually it was two seminars. One on Timelines and one on Internet Research Techiques for genealogy. Both were extremely well done and the presenter, Carol Rooskby Weidlich from the Lee County (FL) Genealogical Society, kept things simple, concise and straightforward and was able to keep any questions or comments on topic.
The afternoon seminar on Internet Resource Techniques was an introduction to the use of general internet search techniques and how these techniques could be used to locate genealogical records. Well done and I wish I would have taken this seminar before I started my own research. It would have saved me a lot of time. The two interesting things I learned were specifically related to the Lee County Library system. Library patrons have free access to the Library Edition of Ancestry but can only access records at one of the libraries. The library system also has a Library subscription to Heritage Quest which patrons can access from anywhere through the library's main portal by clicking on the appropriate link and logging in with their library card number. Likewise, patrons can access PERSI (Periodical Source Index) and WorldCat (for locating books via interlibrary loan), and request these from any location. A couple of nice features I was not aware of.
The morning session on Timelines reinforced my belief that all of us cannot separate our ancestors from history and provided a really helpful site which can help all of us do so. The Our Timlines site is a simple to use site which allows one to enter both a born in and died in year and a few individual specific details which will then display a chronoligical listing of events. Except for the indiviudal specific details, however, these will be skewed to include major worldwide and US events which can then be enhanced with other national and local socio-economic, political and familial events specific to an indiviudal family member culled from census reports, regional histories, local newspapers and directories, and specific events in their lives. What were the "push pull" factors that influenced our ancestors to come to the Americas? Why did they settle where they did? Did they return to Italy to take a spouse or did they marry someone living in the states? How did they meet that person? Through family, friends, were they neighbors, or was the connection work related? Were there any health epidemics that might have affected them? Wars. taxes, etc. While the passage of the Volstead Act might not have hurt many citizens, anyone working in the brewery or distillery business or running a bar would have been seriously effected by Prohibition. Anyway, don't want to ramble on here.
The link for Our Timelines follows. Give it a try and see what you think. Read the Welcome page first.
http://www.ourtimelines.com
Biff