Friday’s post got too long for me to try and catch up so I’ll shoot for a wrap up post in the next couple of days.

Friday was a LONG day! Again, I was fairly methodology heavy, catching another presentation each of Elizabeth Shown Mills and Thomas W. Jones. Mills presented an interesting range of case studies to impress upon us the importance of “trivial” information in documents, for example the minute details in an estate sale that someone didn’t deem important or slaves names that get left out of transcriptions or compilations. She stressed going back to original probate packets or collections to make sure every slip had been accounted for and challenged us to think critically about what the documents said and didn’t say.

Jones presented on documentation. As he noted, this can be a boring topic, but I very much appreciated his detail and again, common sense approach to doing citations. In many ways this is all straight out of undergrad and grad school for me but those days are a little farther behind me every time I blink so getting this refresher and lesson was fabulous.

For the midday and afternoon sessions I jumped over to the African American research track attending presentations by G. David Dilts, Tim Pinnick, Angela Y Walton-Raji, and J. Mark Lowe. Dilts’ presentation (F-322 Overcoming Brick Walls in African American Research) was effectively one on methodology offering ideas to improve attitudes and open one’s mind in approaching brickwalls, as well as offering some common problems and possible solutions.

Pinnick’s session (F-333 And the Church Said Amen) on tracking down records from African American churches was as animated and enthusiastic as the title suggested and somewhere in there he did get an, “Amen!” from the class even after telling us that the existing records weren’t quite what we were hoping for.

Walton-Raji’s session was great survey of Black benevolent societies most of which I knew nothing about beforehand. When I saw her session listing it immediately brought to mind a symbol on my Great-Grandfather’s headstone I had never looked in to. And between her and Pinnick’s sessions in particular, I have a whole new set of records to try and track down.

Finally, I attended J. Mark Lowe’s session (F-350 Following Slaves and Slaveholders…) which offered a great case study emphasizing the need to know the areas you’re researching in and know their laws relevant to your ancestors. This will help you figure out what records might exist to aid you in your research. All were great speakers, but Lowe gets points for making Pinnick hand me a fake $1000 bill in an effort to illustrate that you need to follow the money or assets (whatever they may be).

From there I went straight to the library event in support of the War 1812 Pension Project. I attended the opening remarks and quilt raffle, mingled for a few minutes near the desserts, and then made a beeline for the Genealogy Center to get in some last research for the week. I planned to leave at a reasonable hour (as I had to get it up in the morning) but I had a successful enough time that I didn’t walk back until 11:30 pm.

But now I am just tired…

Happy hunting!

Jess