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On short notice

So the telephone rang yesterday afternoon with a friend from the Association of Professional Genealogists on the line.

NPROn Point, the Boston-based daily talk show on National Public Radio hosted by award-winning journalist Tom Ashbrook, will be focused on genealogy today — today! — at 11 a.m. EST (10 a.m. CST, 9 a.m. MST, 8 a.m. PST).

Could The Legal Genealogist be available to join in the discussion?

Why, sure.

Except for this minor little problem of the cold I picked up in Salt Lake City last week that has me still sniffling a bit.

And, oh yeah, except for that other minor little problem of 10 or 12 inches of fresh wet heavy snow on the ground…

Fortunately, with the marvels of modern medicine, at least some of the cold symptoms can be mostly alleviated. And with the marvels of modern technology, where there’s a telephone line, there’s a radio studio.

So, sure — The Legal Genealogist is joining A.J. Jacobs, editor at large at Esquire magazine and author of Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, and Dr. Spencer Wells of National Geographic’s Genographic Project in a discussion of Crowdsourcing And The New Genealogy Boom.

It was A.J. whose piece “Are You My Cousin?” in The New York Times not quite three weeks ago sparked the program. He’s a fan of crowdsourced genealogy, including the merged online family tree sites such as WikiTree, WeRelate and Geni and the DNA sites like 23andMe and Family Tree DNA.

And nobody understands crowdsourcing and its advantages better than Spencer Wells, whose Genographic Project is the ultimate in citizen science crowdsourcing.

Me? I figure I’m the token traditional genealogist who — despite being a major fan of genealogical crowdsourcing (a fancy modern name for collaborative research!) — is still hoping to convince folks that we need accurate information underpinning our crowdsourced data.

So come join us if you have an hour later this morning. A map and list of the stations carrying the NPR broadcast is on the On Point website, and it’ll be archived and available as a podcast by about 2 p.m. EST this afternoon.

And about that cold and the snow? I think I still have some of my voice this morning. And, so far, the power (and heat) has stayed on. Plus the landline telephone should continue to work even if the power goes out.

But if one of the participants sounds a bit nasal and a bit muffled… you’ll know why.

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