Family History Conference Report

Oklahoma City Stake Family History Conference

11th and 12th of March 2011

Just a brief report on the activities at the Family History Conference that was held last week-end. A big thank you goes to Sister Donna Waddle who serves as the Stake Family History Director and her staff who organized and presented the internet courses. They were great and the one class that I got to attend  gave me a lot of inspiration to start working on my own family history at some new websites. I will list several of these sites at the end of this message. Most classes where attended by about 40 patrons on Saturday. The first class on Indexing Tips could have been better if we would have gotten the indexing program to open up on the internet. As it was we did cover a lot of tips to help you work faster with indexing and handwritting tips. The second class on Records Search was much better after the connection to the internet began to work. I wish all of you could have been there to learn some new tricks.

Friday nights opening session, with our guests from Texas, Brother Kirk Hathaway and Sister Darlene Hathaway who serve as the Area Family History Advisors, was wonderful. They both gave short talks and then showed a video clip of the opening ceremony at the 2010 National Genealogcial Society Conference which was held in Salt Lake City. President Henry B Eyring gave a talk entitled " The Joy of Family History" that was excellent and brought a few chuckles and tears to everyone's eyes. I am planning on purchasing that CD so that I can show that talk again. If your Relief Society or Priesthood group would like me to come and show it for a presentation on family history, just let me know I would be more than happy to arrange that.

I have listed below,  the websites to those interesting genealogy research sites that I learned about at the Conference. They are free except for the last one:

Google Books @ http://books.google.com   over 12 million books that you can download, more than 100,000 genealogies and local histories that you can search by individual word

Internet Archive @ www.Archive.org    2.3 million books and city directories, over 50,000 genealogies and local histories, can be searched by individual word

Family Hisotry Archives @  http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/index.php     A permanent site with over 60,000 genealogies and local histories, you can upload your own publications to archive them.

GenealogyBank.com @ www.GenealogyBank.com   over 1 Billion names, and more than 4300 Newspapers from 1690 to today. 263,000 rare books and documents. Historic Hispanic newspapers from 1808 that were published in the US.  This site is not free, it offers a 30 day trial for $9.95.

Don't forget the FREE Premium Subscriptions available in our own Family History Center at the Stake Building. Such as Ancestry.com, Find My Past, Footnote.com, The Genealogist, Heritage Quest Online, World Vital Records,just to name a few. Of course our most amazing and swiftly growing Church Site, https://www.FamilySearch.org   with over 548 million names from indexing, so far!!

Coming in April,

President Baclawski is "Sweetening the Pot"
 and this is No Joke!!!!! Learn more next week.