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10 January 2011

Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy 2011 - Jeff's Report #2

Jeff reports from his first full day at SLIG:

Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy
Salt Lake City, UT
Monday, 10 Jan 2011

“Fasten your seat belts, put your trays in an upright position” will be the mantra for the week as we take off with Thomas Jones, PhD, CG, CGL, FASG, FUGA, FNGS in his Advanced Genealogical Methodology class. After a full day we are still on the first presentation: Developing an Evidence Orientation. We have been discussing a great deal of terminology around Sources, Information and Evidence as well as the processes of Analysis, Correlation, Weighing, Hypothesis, Case Building and Conclusion leading to a proof argument. Dr. Jones assures us that we will catch up as the week progresses. We did use the two case studies sent ahead of the class to illustrate some of the points in this first presentation.

Also we had a comprehensive presentation by Claire Bettag, CG, CGL on Archival Research at the National Archives and Other Repositories. This was particularly useful as the NARA is undergoing significant changes in its web presence. She emphasized using the finding aids, the descriptive pamphlets and the NARA tutorials that are available at the National Archives website.  She spoke about the Library of Congress Manuscript Division and its registers that describe its principal collections.  120+ registers are published, some of which are online at the Manuscript Reading Room.

This evening I attended Dr. Jones’ lecture Strategies for Finding "Unfindable" Ancestors. The bottom line: finding those ancestors is hard work taking a great deal of time and the cost to travel to the location(s) of original documents.

Jeffrey Vaillant
10 Jan 2011

Read the entire series:
Report #1: 2011 SLIG
Report #2: 2011 SLIG
Report #3: 2011 SLIG
Report #4: 2011 SLIG
Report #5: 2011 SLIG
Report #6: 2011 SLIG


Copyright © 2011 by Kathryn M. Doyle, California Genealogical Society and Library

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