California Genealogical Society blog: Report #2: NGS 2009 Family History Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina

15 May 2009

Report #2: NGS 2009 Family History Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina

Posted by Kathryn Doyle

CGS member Jeffrey Vaillant sent this report on day two, Thursday, May 14, 2009:

This proved to be a very full day which got me behind in reporting. The day started with a brisk walk from the Clarion Hotel to the Conference Center (about one mile) past the State Capital built between 1830-35 and some beautiful limestone constructed churches – a pleasant walk before the humidity sets in.

The session started with a three-hour seminar for the Board for Certification for Genealogists (BCG) process lead by Laura Murphy DeGrazia, Alison Hare and Thomas W. Jones. Since I intend to be certified, this was a most helpful session and when combined with two portfolios at the BCG booth gets the battery charged up.

Next up was Elizabeth Shown Mills” presentation on Finding Females: Wives, Mothers, Daughters & Paramours.

Then it was time for the BCG Luncheon and speaker Kathy Gunter Sullivan's talk Late Night Ruminations. The lunch left a great deal to be desired but I did not come for the meals.

Afterwards there a bit of time to visit the trade show floor with its 150-200 vendors and all kinds of genealogical goodies. The biggest booths belong to ancestry.com and familysearch.org.

Back to class on the run to hear Thomas W. Jones’ Strategies for Finding “Unfindable” Ancestors, followed by Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Finding Origins and Birth Families: Methods That Do or Don’t Work. I was definitely on information overload by this point and loving it.

Then time to meet up with other Professional Genealogy Study Group members to walk to the Big Easy for dinner and conversation. There were fourteen of us gathered from each of the three groups. It was good to see the faces behind the e-mails and instant messaging, but not much time to relax before we had to head back to the Conference Center.

Ancestry.com had an hour presentation on what they are doing domestically and internationally with content additions and their daily struggle between content and quality.

Summing up day two: I am tired and glad to have had all these experiences and only half way through the conference. I'm already thinking about the APG/FGS meetings in Little Rock in September.