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| Some gifts from Ancestry.ca who was one of the sponsors of the conference |
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| Conference attendance totals - from The OGS newsletter |
I attended the following sessions at the OGS Toronto Conference:
It would take me a long time to transcribe my notes from the conference and to put ALL of the valuable things that I learned here on my blog so I have distilled the three days into the following highlights and links worth repeating and sharing:
Plenary: "The Ethical Genealogist in the 21st Century"
Judy G. Russell did the opening keynote address on Friday evening. She was delightfully animated, entertaining and most wise on the subject of genealogical ethics. I learned a lot. Highlights and links worth repeating are:
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| I was live tweeting Judy G. Russell's presentation |
Plenary: "Future Technology and Genealogy
Five Strategies You Need"
Lisa Louise Cooke did the keynote Saturday morning on future technologies. At the end of the plenary, I doubt that there was a dry eye in the house as she concluded her presentation with her own family history journey and a quote from her father who said to her, "you keep the quilt, l'll keep the note". Other highlights and links worth repeating are:
- Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West | Rural West Initiative
http://web.stanford.edu/group/ruralwest/cgi-bin/drupal/visualizations/us_newspapers
- And while I do blog and belong to many genealogical Facebook groups, I don't podcast but I really DO want to publish my family history and Lisa Louise offered the following self-publishing resource Lulu - Online Self Publishing Book & eBook Company https://www.lulu.com/
- Most importantly - it was helpful to hear that there's always room for low-tech. Not everything is online!
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| Lisa Louise Cooke's slide deck |
Plenary- "Lessons From The Cutting Edge"
CeCe Moore (who we learned has Ontario ancestors!) gave the closing plenary and it was a sweet way to close the conference as she described how genealogy can unite and heal and how sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction.
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| CeCe Moore's slide deck |
To get a sense of what CeCe's DNA genealogical work can help people do, watch this:
FINDING YOUR ROOTS DNA SPECIAL WITH CeCe Moore from The DNA Detectives on Vimeo.
Pop-Up Talk - Rural Diaries
The one pop-up that I did attend was about the
Rural Diaries project which is an amazing project for folks to get involved with. It was so great to meet and listen to
Dr. Catherine Wilson and it was alarming to learn that because
longhand cursive writing is no longer taught in Ontario schools, the ability to read these old journals is now being lost.
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| The Rural Diary Project needs help transcribing |
Genealogy Bloggers
As a genealogy blogger, I was grateful that
Ruth Blair - the Passionate Genealogist found me and gave me my green beads that identified me as a genealogy blogger in the crowd of several hundreds at the conference.
More Highlights and Links Worth Repeating
Rather than recap each individual session that I attended, here are some helpful
take-away links:
News To Me:
- Family Search has apps! I was surprised to learn this and most (if not all?) are free! Visit: https://familysearch.org/apps/
- Ancestry announced the release of updated Ontario marriages and deaths during the conference!
- Ontario, Canada, Marriages, 1801-1928, 1933-1934
- Ontario, Canada, Deaths, 1869-1938, 1943, and Deaths Overseas, 1939-1947
- Ancestry is working on the honeymoon registers for Niagara Falls (1949-2011) This collection contains records of honeymoon register books that were signed by newlywed tourists at Niagara Falls, Canada. Also included are guest books that do not contain marriage records.
- 100s of pages of Upper Canada Sundries 1766-1841 will be indexed by Canadiana.ca
- The David Rumsey Map Collection http://www.davidrumsey.com just added 15,342 new maps (now over 58,000 now online) and most are under creative commons license
- Our Digital World has over 1.25 million digital newspaper pages from Ontario! http://ink.ourdigitalworld.org
- More (YouTube) videos are uploaded every 60 days than the three major US television networks produced in 60 years!!
- Many genealogists at the conference were graduates of the National Institute for Genealogical Studies http://www.genealogicalstudies.com/
Don't Want To Forget:
Syllabus Links I Want To Explore
This was my first genealogical conference and it did NOT disappoint!!
Lots of connections and lots of sharing information an learning. I definitely plan to go again next year!
OGS Conference 2017 will be held in Ottawa ( ) and I hope to see you there!
