Where Do You Go for Education and Help?

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We may not be able to attend educational meetings for weeks or months because of the increasing number of new corona virus infections in King County and the state of Washington. So we need to find other ways to grow our skills and stay in touch with one another.

 Some of us learn best visually, some want to listen, and some to read. All of us learn by doing! It's important to take new information and put it to work, and choose what works for you. If you have not tried Twitter as a source of genealogy news and resources, give it a whirl. You need not have an account to search for "genealogy" for instance. 

Webinars/video, podcasts, blogs, genealogy groups, and forums educate, inform, and entertain.

Webinars

Webinars feature some of the best speakers available discussing your genealogy and family history interests. 

Top of your list right now should be RootsTech free sessions: https://www.rootstech.org/video-archive. Some 2019 videos are still available and useful, and the new ones are tremendous and fresh.

 Legacy Family Tree Webinars provides a variety of subjects and speakers. One webinar is free every week; the rest require a membership which sometimes go on sale. See GenealogyBargains.com for instance. A membership also allows you to download the syllabus in advance. 
genealogybargains.com

YouTube offers a plethora of genealogy education and family history entertainment too, free. Subscribe to your favorite channels, like Family History Fanatics, or The Barefoot Genealogist.


Podcasts

When you have a walk or drive planned, or while doing quiet work such as house cleaning, gardening or needlework, listen to a podcast! Barbara has a great blog post about the best: https://skcgs.blogspot.com/2018/11/have-you-listened-to-podcast.html


Blogs

Blogs supply extremely high-quality information. Like this blog, you can subscribe to those you like. Always good:

Genealogy Groups

Genealogy mailing lists have been an invaluable resource; most hosted at Rootsweb like our own list. That service has ended, but all of the list archives are still hosted at Rootsweb, searchable. In my opinion, the archives are half the value of mail lists. 
SKCGS group - find more groups on the blue bar at top

We moved our list to Groups.io; some have gone elsewhere. Many of them are linked from the Rootsweb archives. These new groups are often very lively, so joining and sending information, queries and questions are rewarding. 

 Facebook has many genealogy and family history groups, some very specialized.

Forums

Ancestry hosts a multitude of message boards for surnames, localities and topics. Posting a well-crafted query can pay off with answers for many years. 


Genforum is not as busy as it used to be, but the search can be useful, and commenting is allowed. Loads of great information.

Login to Groups.io to use as a forum

Groups.io can be used as a forum, if you prefer that, as depicted above.

 https://community.familysearch.org/ are often overlooked. If much of your work is in FamilySearch, use these forums.


r/genealogy

You may never have visited Reddit, "the front page of the Internet," for genealogy, but it is very interesting. Also new is Stackexchange Genealogy & Family History. 


As you can see, there are lots of ways to continue your genealogy education and to communicate with your fellow researchers. Please tell us in the comments below what we've missed!


Valorie Cowan Zimmerman

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