Monday, June 12, 2006

SDGS Program with Kathleen Roe Trevena



I attended the San Diego Genealogical Society monthly program on Saturday, which featured two talks by Kathleen Roe Trevena. The talks were interesting and different - not your usual subject resources talk or personal experience talk.

The first talk was "Our Inventive Ancestors: How Key Inventions and Discoveries Changed Our Ancestors' Lives." She covered the period between 1790 and 1870, and touched on Manufacturing, Transportation, Communications, Weaponry, Agriculture and Home Life. Her theme was that inventions that developed power (steamboats, railroads, etc) or used machines (canal locks, cotton gin, reapers, etc) enabled migration faster to more distant places, and enabled agriculture and trade in those places, than in earlier times.

The second talk was "Crossing a Continent: Migration Between the Revolution and the Civil War." She touched on world politics, laws about land, Geography, Migration patterns and Immigration, while tying in the subjects from the first talk.

It was an excellent program and I learned quite a bit. Half of my ancestors came west from NJ, NY and PA in this time period, and the information from the talks helped me understand the forces in their lives that may have caused them to migrate.

Do you have a local society that has monthly programs such as this? If so, I encourage you to attend the meetings and hear interesting speakers like Kathleen Roe Trevena.

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