Genealogy Jottings

This week, for the second time, my local genealogy society met online via Zoom. Our statewide Colorado Council of Genealogical Societies kindly made a subscription available to all its local member societies.

Our guest speaker, Kathy Tarullo, directs one of the Family History Centers in the Denver area. She spoke with much enthusiasm on a topic we can all use these days, online resources for genealogical research.

Although most of the sites looked familiar to me, I have not kept up with many of them. Several have newer features that I have not used.

She categorized sites by function, and I found a few news ideas for sources to try in my hunt for my New England ancestors:

1. Newsletters. Kathy mentioned a site I want to try called Advantage Archives for small-town newspapers (http://www.advantagearchives.com/).
2. Blogs. I already subscribe to a couple she mentioned. I have read Geneamusings (https://www.geneamusings.com) for years but had no idea his web page includes sample source citations. I definitely will look at these.
3. Twitter. I must admit that I do not look at Twitter very often. I find the sign-in procedure a nuisance, but I do not like the idea of remaining permanently signed on to any site.
4. RSS feeds. Kathy recommended using Feedly.com to manage subscriptions to blogs and newsletters. I have not tried this because I have only a few subscriptions.
5. Flipboard. I had never heard of this service. Kathy says you can use it to create albums of posts you want to save to read later. Like I need more reading material.
6. Facebook. I have never joined the Facebook tribe, but I can see some value in linking to pages for genealogy websites and societies. It is on my To-Do list.
7. Instagram. Apparently, this works best for cellular phones, so I probably will pass on this one. I do not think I could work effectively on a phone format. Kathy did call attention here to a site I do want to check out—Mapire (https://mapire.eu.en/). It provides free maps of historical Europe.
8. Webinars. Boy, have I ever participated in webinars during this coronavirus lockdown. She mentioned all the major players—American Ancestors, Board for Certification of Professional Genealogists, Family Tree Webinars (Legacy), Family Search.
9. Podcasts. I never seem to find the time to listen in on podcasts. I can read faster than someone can speak so I find it more efficient to get information via the written word. I prefer webinars for their Power Point pages.
10. You Tube channels. Kathy watches genealogy-related ones on her smart TV. I could do that, too, but I have the same time problem I have with podcasts.
11. Pinterest. I would rather have real bulletin boards and white boards for organizing ideas.

I am glad our group did not have to miss out on this interesting program because of meeting space closures and social distancing. The President of our local society has made a good effort to keep everyone connected despite a pandemic.

Normally, we do not meet during the summer months, so this was the last meeting for this season. The program topic for this month provided all of us with many ways to pursue our research while staying at home during the coming summer months.