BCG Announced 2017 Webinars

BCG (Board for Certification of Genealogists®) announced their webinars for the upcoming year that they present in conjunction with Legacy Family Tree webinars. You don't need to be a member of BCG to listen to these. You can sign up to listen to them live for free. Also, they're available for free for one week after the webinar. I'm not positive, but I think your subscription to Legacy webinars also allows you to listen to these after the free time period has ended. 

This is a great way to learn more about genealogy inexpensively. I know I'm on the look out for education like this that easily fits within my budget! 

 

BCG Webinars for 2017

Posted on December 14, 2016 by mvidlak

The Board for Certification of Genealogists is proud to announce its webinar line-up for 2017. All webinars will be broadcast by Legacy Webinars, and held on the third Tuesday of the month at 8pm Eastern. The webinar schedule is as follows:
– 17 January – Michael Leclerc, CG, “Writing up your Research”
– 21 February – Karen Stanbary, CG, “Weaving DNA Test Results into a
Proof Argument”
– 21 March – Rebecca Koford, CG, “Are You My Grandpa? Men of the Same
Name”
– 18 April – Rick Sayre, CG, CGL, “The Genealogy in Government Documents”
– 16 May – Debbie Parker Wayne, CG, CGL, “MAXY DNA: Correlating mt-at-X-Y DNA
with the GPS”
– 20 June – Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, CGL, “Beating the Bushes: Using the
GPS to Find Jacob Bush’s Father”
– 18 July – Angela Packer McGhie, CG, “Analyzing Documents Sparks Ideas
for Further Research”
– 15 August – LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, JD, CG, “Analyzing Probate Records of
Slaveholders to Identify Enslaved Ancestors”
– 19 September – Tom Jones, PhD, CG, CGL,”When Does Newfound Evidence
Overturn a Proved Conclusion?”
– 17 October, David Ouimette, CG, CGL,“Databases, Search Engines, and the
Genealogical Proof Standard”
– 21 November – Malissa Ruffner, JD, CG, “Research in Federal Records:
Some Assembly Required”
– 19 December – Judy Russell, JD, CG, CGL, “The Law and the Reasonably
Exhaustive (Re)Search”
President Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, CG, says, “The Board for Certification of Genealogists is excited to offer this webinar series that supports our mission to provide education for family historians. These webinars will address genealogy standards for research. By promoting a uniform standard of competence and ethics, the BCG endeavors to foster public confidence in genealogy.”
To register for any of these webinars, please visit our page at Legacy Family Tree Webinars: http://familytreewebinars.com/BCG.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. For more information contact:
office@BCGcertification.org.
View BCG’s past Legacy webinars at http://familytreewebinars.com/BCG and http://BCGcertification.org/blog/bcg-webinars. For more information on BCG’s education opportunities, please visit:
http://www.BCGcertification.org/certification/educ.html.

Cari A. Taplin, CG

The words Certified Genealogist are a registered certification mark, and the designations CG, CGL and Certified Genealogical Lecturer are service marks of the Board for Certification of Genealogists®, used under license by board certificants after periodic evaluation.

Calendar Tip

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the Legacy webinar about organizing.

Last week I finally got a chance to listen to it. Fortunately I subscribe to the webinars as the free access time period had expired by the time I got a chance to listen. I think perhaps that is an indication of how much I need help with organizing! 

Yes I've needed help organizing since early on!

Like many webinars there were many ideas and tips in there and I did not absorb all of them. It is one of those webinars that is good to go back to and listen to again and again. There just seems to be more nuances and ideas popping out each time you hear it.

One idea that I took from the webinar that I am very grateful for is a tip on using Google Calendars. This would work for many different calendar apps and even for a paper one if you use that. However, it was something that Lisa Louise Cooke said about this particular app that I already used that jumped out at me. You can create many different calendars that appear on the same page, assigning different colors to each one. Okay, so this is a basic concept and one that I already use. I have a calendar on there, I also have any of Rich’s appointments in a different color and holidays appear in a third color. Each can have their display turned on or off with a click on the side panel. Easy, simple, and something I’ve been doing for years. No big deal.

However, when Lisa was discussing this, she mentioned having a separate calendar for genealogy projects. Suddenly a light bulb went off in my head! Wait a minute! It doesn’t need to be a person! I can have a calendar and a unique color for my genealogy projects. Another color can be assigned for client work. The menu planning I’ve been trying to do on a paper calendar to streamline cooking and grocery shopping- that could be yet another color on there! Suddenly I was realizing I could pull all these things together in one place. It would not be a jumble of confusion on the calendar- I could just turn on and off the ones I wanted to see at any given moment.

Many people are probably laughing at such a simple idea being a break through on organizing. However, this is often how such things work. What is simple and obvious to one person takes another a longer time to reach. This simple concept has been very helpful to me in organizing. It is giving me hope in sorting out some of the messes I have and finally figuring out what I have and where I need to go next.

Here is my challenge for you. What simple thing do you do that helps with your genealogy or with getting things done so that you have time to do genealogy? Think about it. Something that is small and obvious to you might not be to others. Write about it. It could be just a few sentences on a Facebook or Twitter post. Just write and share it with others and encourage them to also share a small tip that they might have. All of us together can discover ways to save hours of time to do what we really want to do- find those elusive ancestors!

Legacy Family Tree Webinar on Organizing

I just came across a free webinar on Legacy Family Tree webinars. http://familytreewebinars.com/download.php?webinar_id=369

 It is by Lisa Louise Cooke and is free for anybody and everybody to listen to until July 27^th. The webinar is about organizing your online life and from what I can see, mentions Google Calendar and Evernote amongst other programs. I don’t know about you, but I’m sure I can use this and will be listening to it in the next couple days.

Wouldn't it be great to be this organized?

I have some good systems in place with lists and spreadsheets to keep track of things both online and offline. My life would be total chaos without them. However, there are always new ways to organize that might be better than what I’m doing. Even if the ideas are basically the same as what I already do, there are usually some little quirks and tricks that I either haven’t thought to do or have forgotten about.

I use Google Calendar all the time to keep track of appointments and deadlines for various things. I keep running lists of things that need to get done and errands that need to be run. Maybe you can do without some of these lists, but if I walk into the grocery store without one, I won’t even have a clue what I’m supposed to buy for this week! Lately, I’ve been learning a bit about Evernote and believe that this could be a good place to keep some of these assorted lists of things all in one handy place. The one drawback for me is that I don’t have a smart phone, so would have to print out a list to take with me if I need one on the run.

An organizing tool that I would like to find is one that deals with all the urls for websites that I try to keep track of. I’ve used bookmarks or favorites on web browsers, kept lists in Word files and on spreadsheets, but nothing seems to keep them in order for long. Perhaps somebody has something that works well for them?

This is the great thing about the Legacy webinars if you haven’t already started to explore them. People present on various topics related to genealogy and you get to learn from them as they share their knowledge and experience. As you listen and think about what their discussing, other ideas may pop into your head. You can pause the webinar, unlike an in person presentation, and look into these ideas.

Usually each Wednesday is what is referred to as “Webinar Wednesday” where a live presentation is given that is free to listen to then or for the next week. It is kind of like a free conference spread across the year. If you subscribe to their website, you can get the syllabus material to each webinar as well and access to all of the webinars that have been presented. This is great if you don’t get a chance to listen while the webinar is free. It is also an opportunity to not only hear and watch some of the older ones, but also some that have never been available for free.

A few months ago Thomas MacEntee did a free presentation about using Microsoft Word. It was a good introduction. However, there were many, many more parts to the presentation that are only available to subscribers that goes much more in depth. My advice to everyone is to subscribe to these webinars- you won’t regret it!