Friday, December 31, 2010

2010 Retrospective - My Top 10 Genealogy Highlights

Looking back over 2010, it seemed like a very full year of genealogy activity dominated by writing, teaching/speaking and database work.  The highlights, though, were other, more social events.  I will have other retrospective posts about blogging, but here are my Top 10 genealogy highlights for 2010:

10.  Speaking engagements at Chula Vista Genealogical Society, Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego, North San Diego County Genealogical Society, Escondido Genealogical Society, San Diego Jewish Genealogical Society, Corona Genealogical Society, North Orange County California Genealogical Society.  The real fun is meeting and getting to know researchers in other areas.

9.  Teaching "Beginning Computer Genealogy" classes at OASIS (a senior adult education service) in San Diego (ten students, four two-hour sessions each in February, June and October), two "Genealogy-Be An Ancestry Detective" talks at public libraries, teaching "Genealogy 101" for CVGS in May.

8.  Working in my local societies - I am Newsletter Editor (monthly, 10 pages) and Research/Queries Chair (answer queries and lead a monthly Research Group) for Chula Vista Genealogical Society, and write occasional articles for San Diego Genealogical Society and the Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego newsletters.

7.  Writing four Genealogy 2.0 columns for the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) FORUM Magazine.  This is an intellectual challenge each quarter to come up with a topic and cogent discussion of a Genealogy 2.0 topic.

6.  Solving the Jane Whittle parentage research problem.  The keys were the 1852 California Census on Ancestry, the Australian newspaper and vital records databases, the England to Australia immigrant information on FamilySearch, and the English Parish Records on FHL microfilm.

5.  Improving my genealogy database by eliminating name and date errors and duplications, adding master sources and source citations to many facts, and standardizing all of the place names.

4.  Having two-plus days to do genealogy research in the Family History Library during my trips to Salt Lake City in April and October. 

3.  Attending the Southern California Genealogical Society Genealogy Jamboree in June in Burbank.  Attending sessions, being on the Bloggers panel, walking the exhibit hall and meeting with other genealogy bloggers was terrific fun.

2.  Attending the Bloggers Day with FamilySearch.org in October in Salt Lake City.  This was an information-packed day, my highlights was meeting several genea-bloggers I had not met in person before and meeting many of the FamilySearch personnel. 

1.  Attending the National Genealogical Society Conference in Salt Lake City in April.  Attending sessions, walking the exhibit hall, meeting other genealogy bloggers, and seeing snow again were the highlights.

I wrote about all of those activities in my blogs - Genea-Musings, The Geneaholic (a daily journal), and the Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe (the CVGS blog). 

On average, I spend about 8 hours each day writing, researching and reading about genealogy and family history research. 

3 comments:

TorillJ said...

Thank you for a very goog idea which I have used for my blog tomorrow

Joan Miller (Luxegen) said...

Congratulations on a good year!

msc dissertation proposal said...

It's very attractive blog post Genea-Musings , my son likes it very much, thank you for your giving out,