Summer is a great time to travel to the old home places and distant repositories. What's your first step?  Create Your Plan The longer your trip and farther away your destination, the more preparation you will need. Are passport, visa, special vaccinations required? Early on, write away for maps; some are available for free but arrive by mail; good local maps will help in the planning process. How about connections with researchers in the localities you will visit? Join some local societies, and start conversations with the local history groups, libraries, colleges, courthouses, archives and museums. Create a spreadsheet or table to gather names, contact information, closed dates, hours of operation. Before you leave, print your itinerary and the info sheet. Leave a copy at home with friends and family, too.  Prepare short biographies of ancestors who lived locally to leave in vertical files in libraries and archives. Ensure that each bio has your contact information; if...

October Is Family History Month Please share some of your stories here. Send us a sentence or paragraph and pictures: m.strickland@skcgs.org SeattleBGRG.org Telling Our Stories I heard a wonderful radio show this morning about story telling, which followed a great Black Genealogy Research Group of Seattle (BGRG) meeting yesterday about telling our stories. The focus of both the radio show and the BGRG meeting was not just telling our stories aloud, but in getting them OUT -- to our families, to our friends, to legislators or whoever needs to hear and remember them. The radio show is available for listening here:  Three comedians share their thoughts...  (31 minutes),  ...discover the power of sadness   (22 minutes),  both highly recommended.  In genealogy we tell stories about all sorts of things - some technical, such as how to use various record types or sets, how to locate repositories and find what we need, and most important, who our ancestors were and...

Developing Foresight and Creativity I'm reading a thought-provoking book called The Rise of the Creative Class: Revisited by Richard Florida [1]. How does this relate to genealogy and family history? Think of how much our field has changed in the past few years, and even more in our lifetimes. These immense changes, from microfilm and copy machines to online records and virtual meetings, are the result of creativity in action.  When I attended the NGS (National Genealogical Society) Conference in Sacramento last spring, genealogy society delegates met in person for the first time, and spent a morning discussing and learning how to practice foresight . Not predicting the future, but instead, thinking with the future, to better prepare our selves and our societies for the changes that are coming. Did any of us, on New Year's Day 2020 see what was coming and how it would change all our lives?   Many public health experts all around the world had been worried even before Co...