Friday, July 31, 2009

Almost as good as being there?

The four-day BYU Family History Conference just finished today in Provo, Utah. There were many presentations by experienced and renowned speakers on topics of interest to genealogy researchers. The course schedule and talk descriptions are on the web site.

Michael de Groote summarized at least eight talks in his articles for the Mormon Times - you can read them from the Family History link on the publication. I read several of these summary articles and gleaned some tips and information.

The Ancestry Insider, Mark Tucker and Janet Hovorka tweeted through several talks on Twitter - providing highlights from the talks. The hashtag #byugen was used for the conference. It was fun to read the tweets in almost real time. The problem with reading the tweets is that the latest updates are at the top of the list...so you don't get the natural flow of the talk. You start at the end of the conference, or the day, or the talk. Maybe Mr. AI, Mark and Janet will pull their tweets together into posts for all of us to read in the right order (I did this for the Jamboree, but it was a challenge). Thanks, AI, MT and JH!

Mark Tucker posted his slide presentation on his ThinkGenealogy blog in Navigating Research with the GPS – July 2009 Update. He also posted his three-page syllabus material here for the talk. If you have some spare time it is worth printing off the syllabus pages and then scrolling through Mark's slide presentation. I gain more knowledge and insight every time I go through his presentation. Thank you, Mark, for being so open with your presentation material - doing this is different from most presenters at genealogy conferences.

No - it's not almost as good as being there! But it's better than not having any information at all about the talks at the conference.

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