Wordless Wednesday: Witchy Ways

 

Wordless Wednesday: Mayflower 400

April Showers Bring Mayflowers. What does the Mayflower bring? Pilgrims!

Saturday Fun Challenge: An Ancestral Home to Visit

From Randy Seaver's GeneaMusing's Saturday night challenges:

1)  Tell us which ancestral home (an actual building, a village, a town, even a country) you would most like to visit.   Which ancestors lived there, and for how long? 


This is a tough one as there are so many different ones and I would like to visit them all. All of them, even those of my grandparents. Those are one that I visited often as a child and one that I lived in as my parents owned it after my grandparents. I would love to be able to walk through those houses again just as they were when I was a child.

However, I know one ancestral home area that I do not want to visit. At least, next year I do not want to be anywhere near there. Why? Well, because a lot of people want to visit there next year.

My 10th great-grandfather and his wife along with her parents arrived in this country in the year 1620. A young man, John Howland, a teenage girl, Elizabeth Tilley, that would later become his wife, her parents, John Tilley and Joan (Hurst) Tilley are the people. They all landed in Massachusetts from a ship whose name is very familiar— The Mayflower. Next year Plymouth will be celebrating their 400th anniversary of existence.

Although there will be fabulous events taking place and it is a historic anniversary of immense proportions, I do not want to be there. I don’t like crowds and it will definitely be crowded. I am just glad that I have been there twice before.

I was lucky enough to visit there once when I was a teenager. On an extended camping trip throughout New England, my parents and I stopped in Plymouth and saw the main sites.

A few years ago, as an adult, my husband and I visited there for the day. Once again, I got to see the main sites, the famous rock, the Mayflower replica and the burial grounds among others. This trip, I also got to go to Plimouth Plantation and see the recreated original settlement and see how they would have lived upon first arriving here.

Perhaps sometime later, after things have calmed down and there aren’t huge crowds at everything, I’ll go back again.

Wordless Wednesday- The Potter

Wordless Wednesday- Around The Mill Pond

Wordless Wendesday- Old Sturbridge Village Animals

Wordless Wednesday- A Rainy Day in 1838, Old Sturbridge Village

Wordless Wednesday- Random Scenes from NERGC 2017

NERGC 2017 in Springfield

Well, I am exhausted. My head is in a whirl. I’ve written a “To Do” list that is one notebook page long for just genealogy projects. And I am anxious to work my way down all of this! What produces all this you might ask? A genealogy conference!

A scene from the exhibit hall

We returned home Sunday evening tired, but happy from the New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC) in Springfield, Massachusetts. This was a three-day conference with a side trip to Old Sturbridge Village thrown in. For a genealogist, it is like a child being let loose in a candy shop!

The conference, rather obviously, concentrated on New England research and resources, particularly those in western Massachusetts where it was held. However, there are a lot of classes on various topics and they don’t all restrict themselves to this area. There were classes as well on general research methods, Irish research, writing, DNA and military amongst others.

One presenter, Jennifer Zinck, had agreed to do a workshop on DNA. Shortly after registration opened, she agreed to do a second, as the first one had sold out almost immediately. I attended many classes that talked about writing your family history and others that dealt with various areas of the region. One in particular that I enjoyed by Dave Robison talked about the repositories of western Massachusetts. Although I have no ancestors in those places, mine lived across the border in New York State and created at least a few records across that artificial line. There were New York State resources as well. I didn’t get to attend, but I understand that Jane Wilcox did a wonderful whirlwind tour of the various repositories available throughout New York State giving specific examples of each.

One that created many items on that “To-Do” list of mine was a talk by Michael Strauss on World War I records. I’m not that interested in military, so hadn’t thought much before about the various records that might be available for my grandparents who served in this war. His talk definitely kept my interest and gave me several places to look for records.  Luckily, I had a notebook with me to scribble down all those ideas as they occurred!

This is just a small sampling of the courses that are available in different sessions. One of the best parts for me is the networking. I get to see people that I know only through the virtual world of email lists and Facebook. We get to actually talk with each other and share what we are working on. We get to laugh and joke and hang out with each other.

To attend this conference again, we have to wait two years. It is a bi-annual conference and the location rotates around New England with a few restrictions on locations. The planning committees need to choose a place that has a large enough conference center and enough hotel rooms available nearby to accommodate it. I understand that they can no longer go to Vermont, as there is no place large enough for it. On the flip side it is not quite big enough for some of the bigger conference centers. Therefore, it seems to rotate between cities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire at the moment.

So where to next? Well pull out your calendars and mark April 3-6, 2019 down. If you don’t have the route plotted out already, pull out the maps and find Manchester, New Hampshire. It’s just a short drive outside of Boston, and if you don’t want to drive in Boston (I certainly don’t), you just take some of the interstate highways around the far, far edge of it. We have our calendars marked already and I hope I’ll see you there! Now I got to get back to work—where are those forms to request records...

Wordless Wednesday- Waterways

Saturday Challenge- New Year's Goals

Randy Seaver’sGeneaMusings gave us the following:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1) What goals do you have for your genealogy research, education and writing during 2017?  

First, before I start looking at goals for 2017, let’s see how I did last year. This is from the blog about a year ago:

“• Continue organizing my stuff. Kenneth helped me identify some pictures today that I hadn’t been sure of.

• Get copies of stuff digitized and organized to send out to the cousins

• Get at least one line solidified enough to write a booklet about them so that I can publish it and get it in various repositories

• Return to IGHR again this year and take the Law Libraries and Government Documents course

•Attend Syracuse’s New York State Family History Conference

• Attend Professional Management Conference at Fort Wayne, Indiana”

Okay then. How did I do?

Continue organizing my stuff- it’s a lot better then it was a year ago, but still needs some work. I think I’ll call it accomplished with the caveat that more needs to be done.

Stuff digitized. That’s also very much an ongoing project. Although I got a lot done, there’s a lot more to go. It didn’t help either of these goals that I got a lot of craft stuff from Mom. Patterns scattered all over the place and yes, in amongst them, there is family stuff. Pictures and newspaper clippings and such that are of a genealogical nature are interwoven amongst the patterns. It is all slowly coming together.

A booklet written. I didn’t accomplish much of anything on this one. I am basically where I was a year ago.

IGHR. Accomplished.

NYS Family History Conference. Accomplished.

Professional Management Conference. Accomplished.

So, three out of six goals accomplished and two others work in progress. I don’t think that was too bad an accomplishment for 2016. I will continue with the first 3 goals again this year. Additionally, I want to get to the New England Regional Conference in Springfield, Massachusetts and do more research in local repositories across the state.

The registration and reservations are in for Springfield and there’s a pile beside the scanner ready to go, so I guess I’m not off to a bad start for 2017 either!

Other Hobbies- Saturday Challenge.

From Randy Seaver: For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you to:

1)  Tell us about your "other" hobbies or interests outside of genealogy and family history research, writing, speaking, etc.  Be mindful of your family's privacy, though!

2) Write a blog post of your own, respond with a comment to this post, or write a Facebook status post or a Google+ Stream post.

Hmmm, what if I don’t have a life beyond genealogy? Some days it doesn’t seem like it the way things intertwine around each other. Here’s the conversation I had with myself after reading this challenge:

 

View from NYS Library

-Travel. However, most of our trips center around genealogy or some aspect of historical encounters. My latest trip was to a genealogy meeting and the New York State Library and Archives. The next trip will be seeing some of the countryside though. Yeah, some of the countryside as you can see from the interstate, as we don’t have much time before we need to be in Alabama to, you guessed it IGHR, a genealogy institute.

-Crafts. I enjoy working on crafts, especially sewing. I’m working on a cross-stitch project right now. The subject? Oh, well, it’s historic buildings from Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts that we visited a couple years ago. That’s not research, so the historical doesn’t count right? I have a couple sewing projects that I need to get to soon! What are they? Well, one’s an organizer for the car that will help us on our trip to Alabama… and well, the other, is um a cover for a medal for the Sons of the American Revolution so they can do an unveiling.

Drayton Hall, a previous cross-stitch project

-Reading. But aren’t most of the books you read either about genealogy, history or some aspect of technology that helps you with this blog?

-Cooking. I enjoy cooking and collecting recipes. Of course, most of my cooking is reminiscent of what my ancestors cooked or regional cooking from areas that we’ve traveled to on genealogy.

So there you have it. I have hobbies besides genealogy and historical research. However, I am such a nerd about those two areas that everything else manages to revolve around it in some way. Is this good or bad? I don’t know, but I’m enjoying myself!

NERGC Looking Back and Forward

Portland, Maine Headlight from 2015

Providence Rhode Island last year, Manchester New Hampshire 2 years before that, and Springfield Massachusetts next year. At regular intervals, my thoughts have turned to New England vacations in the spring. Yes, New England is a beautiful place to visit in the springtime. I have many ancestors that lived there. But why is there a theme about the time of year developing?

The reason is that every two years I can combine a trip to New England to research and tour an area with some education and meeting up with other great genealogists. A year ago this morning we were heading home from the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence from that year’s The New England Regional Genealogical Consortium, Inc. (NERGC). It consisted of two and a half days of over 95 lectures in total. Many of them were geared towards research in Rhode Island itself, but they covered subjects all over New England and general topics as well.

 

Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts

It wasn’t just about the lectures either. In just about every class, I sat next to somebody I had met before. Walking between classrooms and in the vendor hall I ran into people that I know. Genealogists from all over New England, New York and beyond were gathering there to learn and discuss genealogy. There is huge serge in energy at such a place. If you’ve never been to a conference, you really must go to at least one to see what it is like. I always come home from such a conference exhausted, but with renewed eagerness to dive into more genealogy.

Next year we will be headed to Springfield a little later in April. The theme for the conference is: Using the Tools of Today & Tomorrow to Understand the Past and will be held April 26-29 at the MassMutual Convention Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Although I don’t personally have any direct ancestors that lived in the area, I am sure there will be many lectures that I will look forward to hearing. 

Old town hall or schoolhouse Exeter, Rhode Island

The call for papers has closed, and they are still working on deciding which lectures will be presented. Some of the categories included repositories across New England, and many areas of technology. Other topics on the call for papers included: genealogy research focused within social, cultural, racial, or ethnic groups; and family history writing and publishing in print and on the web. So, there will be quite a variety of topics presented no matter which people are selected to present.

The website at http://www.nergc.org/ is still mainly giving information about last year’s conference, but it should be updated before long. Many volunteers are working behind the scenes to get everything ready for Springfield in 2017. Until then, we will just sit back and dream of New England and next year’s conference. I hope I will see many friends old and new there!