Monday, October 27, 2008

Monday on the TMG Cruise - Part 1

We were up early for breakfast, and I went off to the 8:15 a.m. presentation by Bob Velke on “Introduction to TMG.” I had downloaded the trial TMG before we left home, and had uploaded my database into TMG in New York. Bob led us through TMG terminology, screen layouts, Tags, searching for people, and didn’t have time for basic data entry and sources.

The second talk was “Filtering with TMG” and Bob showed us how to use filters to create groups of people (e.g., all those born before 1800, or all those born between 1800 and 1900, all those with a certain source, all those with an event in a certain location, etc.). I learned a lot from these presentations, and can see how TMG can be used effectively using Tags and Filters.

At 10:45 a.m., John Titford presented “How to Write Your Family History.” He covered the different excuses we use to avoid writing the book (e.g., I’m not finished…; I’m a poor writer; My family story is so ordinary; etc.) He noted that writing a book requires you to make decisions on content and format, to organize your work so that you can focus on writing the book, and writing the book, which will be essentially a series of biographies in a logical order. John recommended using geographical, social and historical context to place each family in a place and time experiencing local or national events. John is a funny and enthusiastic presenter.

The 12 noon presentation was “Beyond Y-DNA: Your Genetic Genealogy Options” by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak. This was the first presentation I’ve heard from Megan. She described the basics of mitochondrial DNA, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP), Ethnic DNA tests, BioGeographical/ Admixture (DNAPrint), the Genographic Project, SMGF tests and studies, and Multi-Purpose DNA Tests (deCODEme and 23andme). Megan is an excellent speaker and presenter. Here is a photo of Bob Velke introducing Megan - I sat at the front of the second section for this talk - you can see the first section of the Princess Theater in this photo (there were about 100 attending this talk):




I’ll put the Monday afternoon events in a separate post.

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