Yes, I'm back

I've had a busy couple of weeks but I'm finally back home now. I attended the Institute of Genealogical and Historic Research (IGHR) in Birmingham, then came home for a few days and had the chance to do a little research in three different counties - Kankakee County, IL, Lake County, IN, and Randolph County, IN. There was some mixed success on these trips, but some good did come out of it all. I want to post about my class at IGHR first though, once I get settled so be on the lookout for that!

Off to IGHR

I'm off to Birmingham, Alabama this morning to attend the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research at Samford University. The Institute runs through Friday of next week and I can't wait to get there! Last year was my first year and it was absolutely amazing; the course (on Virginia) was extensive and meeting the people whose names you see all over the genealogy sites was fantastic. This year should be even better!

SLIG registration opens today!!

Just a reminder that registration for the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy opens up this morning at 9am Mountain Time (10am Central, 11am Eastern). Courses offered for the January 2012 Institute include:

~American Research and Records: Focus on Families - Paula Stuart-Warren, CG, FUGA
~Advanced Evidence Analysis Practicum - Angela McGhie (Angela is the coordinator of the
ProGen study programs and President of the D.C. area chapter of APG)
~Advanced Research Tools: Land Records - Rick Sayre, CG and Pamela Boyer Sayre, CG, CGL
~Advanced New England Research - D. Joshua Taylor (Josh works for the NEHGS and has
appeared on the NBC program, "Who do you Think you are?")
~Welsh Research - Darris Williams, AG
~Swedish Research - Geoffrey Froberg Morris, AG
~Research in the Midwestern United States - Kory Meyerink, MLS, AG, FUGA
~Genealogy Software and Research Tools - George G. Morgan (co-host of the popular podcast,
"The Genealogy Guys")
~Principles of Effective Genealogical Librarianship - Drew Smith, MLS
~Beyond the Library: Using Original Source Repositories - John Philip Colletta, Ph.D., FUGA
~Advanced Genealogical Methods - Tom Jones, Ph.D., CG, CGL

The cost for registration is $400 for those who are not members of the Utah Genealogical Society and $350 for those who are members. The dates are January 23rd-27th.

Boston University Genealogy Certificate course...yay or nay?

So with the NGS Home Course finished and my personal research kindof frozen right now, I was looking for something else that I can do to make good use of my genea-time when I got an email from Boston University announcing a 4-part payment plan for their Genealogy Certificate program. Considering the cost of the course is around $2600 bucks (not including a slight discount for NGS and APG members) a payment plan sounded pretty good. Good enough in fact, for me to revisit the website for the program and reassess things. Here's what I found:

~The next course starts on September 6th
~The 4-part payment plan is an automatically reoccurring payment made to your credit card in 4 monthly installments
~There are 6 modules; Foundations of Genealogical Research, Problem Solving Techniques and Technology, Evidence Evaluation and Documentation, Forensic Genealogical Research, Genealogical Research Ethnic and Geographic Specialties, and The Professional Genealogist
~It is an online program with short video clips from your instructors, interactive lessons, weekly assignments, and online chats with both your instructor and your other classmates
~There are 3 required texts; The BCG Standards Manual, Evidence Explained, and Professional Genealogy (many of you probably already own these titles)
~This is NOT a beginner course. Instead, it is more like an expansion of the NGS Home Study Course. (If you are looking for a more basic program to get grounded in fundamentals, BU will soon be starting a course on essentials. More info should be forthcoming within the next week or two)
~There is an orientation online prior to the the official start of the course

I was initially a little leery of this program, partially because of the whopping cost but also because I was concerned about overlap with material covered in the NGS course. But the payment plan helps ease the pain a little, as does the discount from being an NGS/APG member, and after speaking with an associate from the University about the course this afternoon, I feel pretty confident that this will go much further in-depth than the NGS course did. Just think of the NGS course as laying the groundwork and the BU course filling in the details. The associate from the University also claimed that their course was geared more towards people who had a goal of working in the field professionally and/or looking to get certified within the next couple years so this might be a good fit for me since that is definitely on my to-do list.

As I said earlier, the next course starts up on September 6th (that is when the online portal will open up and you will have access to your coursework and get your first assignment) so you have a bit of time to think about the pros and cons and learn more about the course itself. Just check out http://genealogyonline.bu.edu/index.htm

Yikes!! New one for me

I've been working with my Parke County indexing this month and came across a slightly scary new name that I haven't seen before, so I thought I'd share. Check this out:



It was in the probate file for a John S. Kesler. The Kesler part I get; from this indenture, I can read the surname here as Cassler so it's easy to see how that evolved into "Kesler". But the given name! Wow! That's the doozy for me. It looks like Chawntzenbach. If you shorten it to "Chawn" then it would sound like John so even that part makes sense. What surprised me was the given name as it is written here because it's something I've never seen before. I entered the name into both yahoo and google but got 0, yes 0 results. But in google, when I enter "Chawntzenbach" I did get an alternate which was included in the search, Schwarzenbach. For this, there were quite a few search results including a link to Wikipedia which states the name is used for several geographic locations in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia. There is also a river called Schwarzbach in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany. All of these could be helpful clues for one so inclined to go digging for this individual.

No, I am not that individual....at least, not today :)

New course offered by NGS

The blog for the National Genealogical Society, UpFront with NGS, announced a new course offering a couple weeks ago. The focus will be on Civil War records and will make a great addition to their other courses which include a course on Transcribing, Extracting, and Abstracting, religious records, deeds, the census schedules, records relating to the Social Security Act, and of course, the Home Study Course (which I blogged about over several months). The Civil War records course was developed by Craig Robert Scott, CG who many of you will be familiar with from the military track at IGHR, as well as his various seminars at the national conferences. In fact, he will be holding lectures at this week's NGS conference in Charleston. Adding to his incredible resume, he is also the head of Heritage Books, where you can find tons of great titles including those that are often hard to find elsewhere. Oh, and he was also the CG mentor for my ProGen group (ProGen 3) as if all that wasn't enough. Convinced enough to take the course? I am!

I was waiting to post about it until it showed up on the Education Courses page of the NGS website but after reading more about the course on Angela McGhie's wonderful educational blog, I checked again and it's still not listed. The official press release states that it will debut at the conference which begins tomorrow, so hopefully it will appear on the NGS website for purchase soon after that. The release also states that it will be available as a CD-Rom or as a pdf and the cost will be $35 for NGS members (as I know all of you are, right......? :p ).

Speaking of additional courses...

I've just come across yet another educational opportunity that you all might be interested in. It's called the Regional In-depth Genealogical Studies Alliance, Inc. and it's a week-long course covering a wide spectrum of the research process beginning with reading handwriting, then followed by transcribing and abstracting documents as well as instruction on citations and writing a research plan and utilizing online sources. The idea itself sounds like a pretty darned good idea to me as it is, but then you find out that the course is staffed by J. Mark Lowe and Linda Woodward Geiger, both are very well-known and accomplished Certified Genealogists and I have great respect for both of them. The course will be held in Texas in September this year and will be in Georgia in October next year. If you're interested in finding out more, see the RIGS Alliance website for details.