ANTICIPAY-YAY-YAY- YAY – YAY- TION…

(So did you sing it?)

It’s the night before!

Tomorrow I’m going to go to work, but I’m only going to work half a day. And then, I’m going to drive to Syracuse (NY)! Where I will check into my hotel, and register my attendance at the New York State Family History Conference!! My first ever genealogy conference!

I am so excited and so looking forward to this! They are running three tracks of classes on both Friday and Saturday from 8:30 AM until 4:15 PM (plus lunch sessions and dinner sessions and a bonus session on Friday between the end of classes and dinner), and there will be a vendor / exhibitor hall as well. I downloaded the syllabus it’s about 200 pages long (more with ads). I don’t know how to choose! In some time periods, I want to see two classes that run at the same time, and sometimes I want to see all three! (I have to figure out how to choose. I really have to.) 

I am going to take lots of notes!

There will be presenters who are experts in the field. There will be presenters whose blogs I have followed for months or years now – sometimes two of my favorite bloggers/television and /or Twitter personalities are scheduled at the same time. (Drat!) Some of the presenters whose names I recognize are: Judy Russell of The Legal Genealogist blog -- she’s a genealogist with a law degree and teaches on the interplay between genealogy and the law at several venues with lots of initials as well as genealogy conferences; D Joshua Taylor, is a professional genealogist who blogs at his own blog and an occasional column for the JSTOR Daily called The Genealogy Factor  – he is also cohost of the PBS series, genealogy roadshow, and has appeared on “Who Do You Think You Are?” (both the NBC and TLC versions) and teaches at family history events worldwide; Curt B Witcher is the manager of the genealogy center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne IN - which I think is second only to the Mormon genealogical library at Salt Lake City in importance of genealogical collections in the USA; there will be people from the NY State Archives; and, at lunch on Friday, Dick Eastman of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter is speaking (HUGE genealogy blog, read by more than 75,000 genealogists all over the world).

I don’t think that I will know anyone there. So if you read this and will be there, and we happen to bump into each other, please say “Hi!” (I assume there will be name tags – aren’t there always name tags at conferences?)

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Other updates:

I had intended to put up a new NoteWorthy Reads post last weekend, but, obviously, that didn’t get done. I did work on it, but the authors of the genealogy blogs I follow came back from summer vacation all rested and restored…and tripled their normal output! Over 700 posts in two weeks! (Maybe I’m following too many genealogy blogs….) Since I will be at the conference this weekend, it won’t go up this weekend either; so it looks like NoteWorthy Reads will appear once this month, on or about September 26, 2015.

I’m also working on adding a whole new branch to my tree, and tracing them down a generation or two (before I see if it helps me go up, too), due to the very kind assistance of my new cousin-in-law who is granting me access to her private tree. I’ve done a blog post on her husband’s and my common ancestors, my third great grandfather, George Taylor and his wife Ann McArthur, in which I indicated that I knew virtually nothing about their daughter Margaret and would like to know more. My new cousin-in-law’s husband descends from Margaret and that branch has a lot of people. I’m looking forward to introducing you to some through blog posts when I get caught up. Thus far, that branch has remained largely in Canada (new history to address, oh boy!), although I know some eventually emigrated from Canada to the USA.

And now, I need to get back to packing. In an effort to save time, I did a large load of laundry – too large, now I need to iron whatever I decide to pack. Sigh.