Saturday, November 24, 2007

"Tracing Ancestry with Genealogists" on TV

If you don't want to go to all the trouble of tracing your own ancestry using online and traditional research techniques, just have someone do it for you.

Greg Wayland, a New England Cable Network (NECN) reporter, went to the New England Historic Genealogical Society to get help - and got a tour from CEO Brenton Simons and a lot of help from Michael LeClerc of the NEHGS staff. The result is a 5 minute, 44 second video story titled "Tracing Ancestry with Genealogists" shown on NECN. The link to the story is here.

I thought that this video was extremely well done - tying Wayland to his great-grandparents using records and gravestones. It touched on New England resources, a Nova Scotia ancestor, and an Irish immigrant family. The mix of short video with photographs and voice-overs was very effective. It is sure to bring some new researchers to the NEHGS door in Boston. Everybody wins here - NECN gets a public interest story, and NEHGS gets some good publicity.

We need more video stories like this on local television all across the country. Our societies would really benefit from something like this shown on PBS or local cable stations.

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