Seminar

I know, for most of you, rain is not unusual. But, in Phoenix; it is. And it feels good to see it raining and it smells wonderful this morning. Of course, that was originally written on Sunday morning. It has been sunny and 70 ever since. Not complaining.

I attended a wonderful seminar on Saturday. Mr. Witcher (see Thursday's blog for details) is indeed motivating. He is an excellent speaker. He told us about federal/state/county records which are not normally included in an initial genealogical search. They aren't in MY normal searches, or haven't been until now. I am anxious to spend some time online checking out what I can find. We need to learn to include WorldCat.org and loc.gov/coll/nucmc (Nucmc) and the Library of Congress - loc.gov/index/html, in our routine searches, just to name a few. Another theme he emphasized was to make sure we look at not only surnames when doing a search, but place, ethnicity, religion and occupation. The number of federal papers and state, county and city level papers that are not normally considered by genealogists is enormous. And information in them, including possibly about our ancestors, might be just what we are looking for.