Thursday, October 30, 2008

Thursday on the TMG Cruise

Here is the view of the dock on St. Kitts that greeted us this morning.

We were up early because we had a hosted breakfast with Barbara Vines Little at 7 a.m. and an on-dock time of 8:20 a.m. for a tour to the St. Kitts Scenic Railway. There were eight of us at the breakfast in the Coral Dining Room but we had little time to talk about genealogy. We went off on our three-hour tour on an 8 mile-per-hour rocking narrow gauge sugar cane train, traveling mainly past the back yards of St. Kittians, many of whom waved as the train passed, especially the school children. Here is a picture of Linda and the choir onboard the train:


We were back to the dock by 12 noon, and Linda stayed in town to shop a bit while I came back to the boat for lunch. I ate lunch with Joanne from Oregon and Lorna from New Zealand, who are both TMG devotees. They extolled the virtues of TMG and I am truly convinced that it’s a very powerful program that the user can bend to his or her will, but is it worth that effort? We shared research experiences and Linda joined us a bit later. Linda went off to swim and I went to the room for a nap, the better to stay awake for the one genealogy lecture tonight. After my hour-long nap, I walked around the ship looking for genie folks to talk to, and found Lee and Charlie in the restaurant. The ship departed St. Kitts before 6 p.m., and we left the restaurant at 6 p.m. to go to Club Fusion.

The only speaker of the day was Cyndi Howells on “Plotting, Scheming and Mapping Online.” Cyndi is an excellent speaker, and covered her Ten Quick Tips about maps in 30 minutes, using many examples to illustrate her points. She also discussed finding maps on Migration Trails in detail, and showed some online map creation tools like Google Earth and Earth Point. Her syllabus has many URLs to explore. This was a great lecture – very helpful and informative.

We went to dinner at 7:15 p.m., and ate with three other genea-cruisers – Susan, Sharon and Truman. We shared our adventures of the day and our research experiences before we left after 9 p.m. Dessert was good, too!

David Allen Lambert had another Group Discussion at 9:30 p.m. on “Atlantic Canada.” There were about 30 of us around a table in CafĂ© Caribe and David described the records available for Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. He has ancestry in most of those provinces, and has done extensive research at NEHGS and other repositories. Later, he answered questions from the audience. Even at the late hour, the conversation was lively, and David really knows his material. He passed around a book titled “Atlantic Canada Research” by Terrence Punch and George Sanborn published by NEHGS in 1997 that looks like a good one to have. Off to bed – we go snorkeling on Friday!

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