NERGC 2019 ~ Day 3

This last day of NERGC was again, a very busy day. (See NERGC Day 1 and NERGC Day 2.)

I heard Ann G. Lawthers speak about Colonial Migration Patterns which is inspiring me to think about researching some of my more distant ancestors in New England, as well as those ancestors who migrated from Virginia to Kentucky after the Revolution. An interesting takeaway is that, before the Revolution, it was the German and Scots-Irish immigrants who tended to be farmers with pioneering skills, willing to venture further inland.

I then got to meet and introduce D. Joshua Taylor, President of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society (NY&GB) before he spoke about Pathways from New England to New York. This is one of those subjects I need to explore in order to understand hows and whys of the migration of some of my ancestors who moved from New England into or through New York on their way to places further west. For example, the Adsits, Chapins (paternal side) and Greeley (maternal side) went to Chicago, Illinois. Some family lines continued further west.

D. Joshua Taylor

Saturday's luncheon had another great speaker, Robert Charles Anderson of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), speaking about the Great Migration Study Project that he has managed for thirty years.

Mid-afternoon, I heard Blaine Bettinger, The Genetic Genealogist, speak about The Stories Behind the Segments, where he reminded us that the ancestors from whom we received DNA were real people and have stories. He used examples showing that, for example, a fourth great-grandfather was born just a few miles from where he grew up and therefore, the small amount of DNA received from that ancestor didn't travel very far in well over 100 years.

Blaine Bettinger's title slide

The last session I attended was Evernote for Every Genealogist with Cyndi Ingle of CyndisList. I have used Evernote, a note-taking program, for several years, but figured that Cyndi (an engaging speaker, by the way) would be able to offer some additional tips on how to take advantage of this great tech tool. And she did! I learned that you can create a table of contents within one of your Evernote Notebooks: Select a group of notes (click on the note at the top, shift-click the note at the bottom), then several options appear, one of which is Create Table of Contents Note (see image below) and when you click on this, you've created another note in that notebook with a list of hyperlinks to each of the notes that you selected. (I thought this was pretty cool.)

There is also a checkbox icon that you can select to create a checkbox next to each note so you can check it off if it is a research task. Again, I thought this was pretty cool.

I stayed for the Saturday Banquet in order to hear D. Joshua Taylor again, speaking on Family: Links to the Past and Bridges to the Future, the theme of this conference. He shared some great stories, bringing a tear to a few eyes as we left the conference thinking of those for whom we enjoy researching and sharing our family stories.

I hope to see you at NERGC in two years: April 14-17, 2021, in Springfield, Massachusetts! If you're on Facebook, check out the NERGC page for more photos.