… and you can join in

Every year, around the time of its Board of Trustees meeting in Salt Lake City in the fall, the Board for Certification of Genealogists does something special.

It says “thank you” to the Family History Library and its staff for everything they do for us, and for the genealogical community as a whole.

The FHL is the home-away-from-home for many of us — the repository of all those rolls of microfilm and all those books and all that amazing knowledge inside the heads of the resource staff.

Where we can check the deeds from 1799-1803, discover we need the deeds from 1804-1810, and simply get up from the microfilm reader, put the first roll of microfilm back, grab the second one and keep researching without missing a beat.

Where we can find that one printed copy of the obscure book about a unique set of records in a county whose records were otherwise destroyed by fire or flood.

And — best of all — where we can ask for help when we find ourselves stuck trying to figure out which parish or which canton or which county would have our ancestors’ records at that time.

Open now seven days a week (Sunday has limited hours and limited areas open), and always always always free, the Family History Library is simply a wonderful place.

The Board for Certification of Genealogists and its trustees — and The Legal Genealogist is one, now in my third and final three-year term (term limits! yay!) — know this only too well, and we are so very grateful.

So we say thank you each fall with a free lecture series — the Joy Reisinger Memorial Lecture Series, named for the late Joy Reisinger, former BCG Vice President and Certified Genealogist Emeritus — for the Family History Library and its staff. It’s also always free and always open to anyone who’s anywhere near Salt Lake City at the time.

And, this year, for the third year in a row, you can join in at home.

Because, thanks to BCG’s webinar partner, Legacy Family Tree Webinars, the day-long series of lectures will be broadcast and recorded — free.

Six lectures will be presented, starting at 9:00 a.m. Mountain daylight time (MDT) and running through to 5:00 p.m. MDT, on Friday, September 6, 2019. You can join us in person at the Family History Library if you’re in the Salt Lake area, or you can listen in at home via Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Here’s the line-up, with hotlinks to webinar registration:

9 a.m. — Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG, FNGS, FUGA — “Reasonably Exhaustive Research: The First Criteria for Genealogical Proof”
Tracking a project from start to finish, this session demonstrates the principles of reasonably exhaustive research and how much is required to prove identity and parentage.

10:15 am — Martha Garrett, PhD, CG — “Finding Immigrants Who ‘Disappeared’: A Research Approach Based on Recognizing and Challenging Assumptions”
Many families have stories about relatives who disappeared. Typically, these relatives left their homes and immigrated to another country, but somewhere along the line they seemed to vanish. Although apparent disappearances can be caused by holes in the historical records, assumptions made by genealogical researchers are often the cause. Consequently, a research approach focused on recognizing and challenging these assumptions can lead to positive results. Specific examples in this presentation are taken primarily from an article series about disappearing Swedes being published in the Swedish American Genealogist, but the principles apply to all immigrant groups.

11:30 am — Judy G. Russell, JD, CG, CGL — “Share and Share Alike: The Rules of Genealogical Privacy”
Genealogy by its very nature is collaborative-we need to work together and share information with others, both relatives and non-relatives if we’re to succeed in filling out our family trees. But doing family research doesn’t mean giving up all semblances of personal privacy, nor is it a license to invade the privacy of others-family or not. All researchers need to follow the rules, both legal and ethical, when we share genealogical information.

1:30 pm — Karen Stanbary, CG — “Details of New and Modified DNA-Related Standards”
One genealogist’s overview of the new and modified standards adopted by the Board for Certification of Genealogists in October 2018 and set out in the 2019 second edition of Genealogy Standards.

2:45 pm — Melinda Henningfield, CG — “How to Write a Case Study that Meets the New Standards for DNA: As Codified by the Board for Certification of Genealogists”
Mary Jones was female, landless, illiterate, and poor in Arkansas in the mid-nineteenth century. Her husband left her for another woman, her parents and many of her siblings left her for California, and the local courthouse burned to the ground destroying most of the evidence of her life. Mitochondrial and autosomal DNA evidence supports Mary’s inferential connection to her parents and siblings. How then do we write a case study about Mary that meets the new DNA standards?

4 pm — Richard “Rick” Sayre, CG, CGL — “Reconstructing an Entrepreneurial Woman’s Life: From Family Intrigue to Water Rents”
Appling the principles of reasonably exhaustive research, the project demonstrates both the process to document the life of a nineteenth century German immigrant from her ancestral village to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania and illustrates how this woman, who was a single parent most of her life, employed her strong entrepreneurial spirt to provide for her family. Both traditional and more obscure urban sources are employed.

Registration is available at the Legacy Family Tree Webinars site now: go to http://www.familytreewebinars.com/BCG and then click on the View All link at the upper right to review the options and sign up.

We hope you can join us as we at BCG say “thank you” to the Family History Library and its staff!

As always, recordings of the presentations will be available free online for a few days after the presentations are aired live.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Thanks to the FHL, 2019 style,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 13 Aug 2019).