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On Tuesday, May 3, attendees at the DACS General Meeting were treated to an excellent and informative presentation by DACS member, Jack Scully on Genealogy. Jack has spent 30+ years in this hobby of love going all the way from pencil and paper research to the use of computers to make finding information on his family’s roots easier and more productive. It was apparent to everyone in the audience that Jack both loved his subject and was an expert. He prepared a professional presentation sprinkled with real life examples and several demonstrations. His presentation style and ability to answer the many varied questions made the evening a pleasure. He started out by explaining how collecting Genealogy used to be time consuming, difficult and expensive and brought us into the information age where the Internet, scanners, laptops, printers and digital cameras can now allow for much easier data collection, storage and production. As he went through the evening he provided hints, tips, and pitfalls one might run into. He gave a description of how each of the new tools available can be used and described some of the major online resources that an average person can use to do research. He demoed how he uses the Family Tree Maker application to store his information, including pictures on people, documents and sound. He took the audience to Ancestry.com to show some of the online information available and described how to get started in Genealogy. He referenced FamilySearch.org which allows free access to the extensive collection of family records maintained by the Morman church and Ancestry.com which is subscription based. He also pointed to Cindislist.com which has links to almost a quarter of a million Genealogy sites. After many years of collecting data Jack now has over 1700 people listed in his family database and showed many of the various ways you can enter and update data and display it through the reporting capabilities of Family Tree Maker. He explained that there are many other programs available similar to Family Tree Maker, and literally thousands of web sites and chat rooms devoted to the subject. He ended his presentation by showing a family history of relatives that served in the armed forces from the Civil War through today and explained that he even discovered one of the relatives was a German soldier during the war. Judging by the numerous questions from the audience, he hit the nail on the head with his knowledge and presentation. |
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