I had the great pleasure to attend the FGS Conference in Springfield Illinois from September 6-10th. I have been playing catch up since I got home so this is a little late. I went down with Louise St. Denis and Susanna de Groot from the National Institute for Genealogical Studies.
We drove down to Springfield on the Tuesday and arrived just as the blogger reception hosted by FamilySearch began. I had an invitation to this event and was warmly greeted by everyone.
They announced the opening of registration for the Rootstech Conference to be held in Salt Lake City from February 2-4, 2012. You can sign up for early registration here and it costs $129 until November 30th when the price goes up to $189. Rootstech 2012 sounds like it is going to be better than this year.
They have launched a new database for Civil War Era Records.
They also talked about Field Express where they take images from digital cameras and put them straight on the web. These images can be browsed but are not indexed. The turn around time for this is about four weeks but they are trying to streamline it to two weeks.
This type of operation has a lower cost and by putting images directly online means we do not have to wait to have the index created by volunteers before we can view the images.
If you have some spare time you might want to consider volunteering for the FamilySearch indexing project.
FamilySearch are increasing the number of images that are captured in the field. In 2011 they have published nearly ten million and they hope to double this number by the end of the year.
Family History Archives is going to replace the Brigham Young University’s database of genealogy and family history books. It is in beta at the moment and you can access it on the FamilySearch Labs site.
There is a new search engine that is easier to use and more powerful. The site will include all the previously scanned material and will be uploading new and previously unavailable material.
On Wednesday we toured Springfield and visited everything Lincoln. We visited his house, his tomb and the Presidential Museum. The Presidential Museum had a wonderful production highlighting aspects of his life and presidency. The bombs during the Civil War section really made your teeth rattle.
They also had a production that looked at the ghosts that can be found in material held by archives. Unless you go into the archives to search the material these ghosts and their stories will remain forever silent.
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