Sunday, October 11, 2015

Is Silence Golden?

I have neglected my genealogy blog for the past few weeks and am excited to be able to get back to researching the Tucker family line, and continue transcription of my great grandmother's journals as well as transcribing the history of the Jacksonville Community Church.

So, what has taken me away? I am in the process of finishing my first mystery novel. Have been seriously working on it for the past year, and am now in the final (I hope) editing stage. 

The other distraction for the last month has been filling my role as organizer/ point person for our genealogy club's October Fall Lecture Series. That was held yesterday at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg. We had over 100 people register, and had to cut off registrations early last week. We ran two tracks of sessions from Skill Building with national speaker Sharon Hodges, to Genetic Genealogy: DNA by another national speaker, Shannon Combs-Bennett. One of our members presented on Genealogy meets Social Media. Other sessions went into Burned County Research Methodology, Researching African American ancestors, and Getting the most from Family Search and Stephen Morse websites.

When the speaker asked the 80+ people sitting in the session on Family Search and Stephen Morse, how many used SteveMorse.org, I was the ONLY one to raise my hand! When I was a baby genealogist, SteveMorse was my go-to for finding New York City births and marriages. It was amazing to me that so many people are not aware of his site. It has so much great information.

I was pleased when several of the speakers stressed: Do not put online or publish any information about living people. If you want to put your own information out there, fine. You do not have the right to make anyone else's information available to the public. 

Anything found on the Internet is ONLY a clue. Do your own research, and verify, verify, verify.

Cite your sources as you go. Use timelines.

Take caution when posting vacation photos. If you say your whole family is at Disneyworld, everyone will know your house is empty. 

Have a great day!

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