Weekly genealogy chat topics - now a week long event!

Question

Starting Saturday, Aug 23, 2014, our weekly genealogy chat, which just entered its 2nd Year (born Aug 10, 2013), becomes a WEEK LONG event!.

Feel free to drop in and share your thoughts anytime. If you wish, you can register yourself for the event beforehand so you get a reminder before it starts.

Important note: The Weekly Genealogy Chat occurs in its own room, not the main room (Roots).

If you have any topic ideas for sequential weeks, feel free to share them in an answer here - or while you are in the chat with us!

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We're reviving the Weekly Chat -- and starting off 2015 by following along with Thomas MacEntee's Genealogy Do-Over: see 2015: Year (okay, thirteen weeks) of the Do-Over?

The Do-Over will finish up in March, so let's hear your ideas for new weekly chat topics!

The topics for older chats are below.

• Genealogy Chat 1st week of Month | Monthly Workshop

• Genealogy Chat, week beginning 27 September 2014 | Uh-oh! These weren't the DNA test results I was expecting!

• Genealogy Chat, week beginning 20 September 2014 | Using non-specialist tools for your research

• Genealogy Chat, week beginning 13 September 2014 | Improving the Weekly Chat

• Genealogy Chat 1st Saturday of Month | Monthly Workshop Chat (next on 6th September)

• Genealogy Chat, weeks beginning 23 & 30 August 2014 | Using GIS for Genealogy

• Genealogy Chat, week of 16 August 2014 | Interpreting Photographs

• Genealogy Chat 1st Saturday of Month | Monthly Workshop Chat (next on 6th September)

• Genealogy Chat 26 July 2014 | Graduating the Site

• Genealogy Chat 19th July 2014 | Stay at Home Genealogy

• Genealogy Chat 12th July 2014 | Working to the Genealogical Proof Standard

• Genealogy Chat 28th June 2014 | Starting Over? Why and When?

• Genealogy Chat 21st June 2014 | Desktop or Web?

• Genealogy Chat 14th June | Researching the Female Line

• Genealogy Chat 1st Saturday of Month | Monthly Workshop Chat (next on 6th September)

• Genealogy Chat 31 May 2014 | Paleography and handwriting

• Genealogy Chat 24 May 2014 | What's in a name?

• Genealogy Chat 17 May | Somebody is wrong on the Internet!

• Genealogy Chat 10 May 2014 | Ephemera and unofficial sources

• Genealogy Chat 3 May 2014 | Advice for getting started

• Genealogy Chat 26 April | Geography and Genealogy

• 19 April 2014: No chat

• Genealogy Chat 12 April 2014: Genealogy Search Engines -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

• Genealogy Chat 5 Apr 2014 | Effective Citations

• Our topic for 29 March 2014 will be : Understanding historical contexts

• Our topic for 22 March 2014 will be: Genealogy Utility Software

• Our topic for 15 March 2014 will be: Work in Progress

• Our topic for 21 February 2014 will be What I wish I'd known when I started

• Our topic for 15 February 2014 will be Tracking down local sources

• Our topic for 8 February 2014 will be Making Time for Genealogy

• Our topic for 1 February 2014 will be "Essential websites"

• Our topic for 25 January 2014 will be "Clue or red herring?"

• Our topic for 18 January 2014 will be "What's on your bookshelf?"

• Our topic for 11 January 2014 will be "Wow records"

• Our topic for 4 January 2014 will be Comparing workflows

• There will be no official chat topic on 21 December and 28 December 2013.

• Our topic for 14 December 2013 will be Mistakes we've made

• Our topic for 7 December 2013 will be Holiday genealogy

• Our topic for 30 November 2013 will be Doing Genealogy on the cheap

• Our topic for 23 November 2013 will be Getting the most out of the big sites

• Our topic for 11/16/2013 will be engaging relatives or getting older people to share what they have/know

• Our topic for 11/9/2013 will be language barriers

• Sharing your work -- tips, tricks, pitfalls and prizes will be our topic again for 11/2/2013

• Our topic for 10/26/2013 will be Sharing your work -- tips, tricks, pitfalls and prizes

• Our topic for 10/12/2013 will be ephemera and other sources not of an official nature

• Our topic for 10/5/2013 will be Genealogy Travel.

• Our topic for 8/31/2013 will be current brick walls and how to break them.

• Our topic for the first week (8/10/2013) will be Genealogy software.

Answer 1

[Topic for 2/15/2014]

Topic for future weekly chat: How do we track down sources for an area/timeframe that we're interested in? I'm hoping a chat will help us structure a series of 'canonical posts' about locating sources for different countries.

Stealing shamelessly from https://ell.meta.stackexchange.com/q/754:

The idea behind Canonical Posts is to take a subject which is often encountered ... and create a post which thoroughly explains that topic. The goal is for these posts to be as useful and easy-to-understand as possible.

Answer 2

Here are some things that come to mind.

1. I've seen several questions where the mods have responded that they aren't really a good SE question -- might some of these questions be good topics for chats? E.g. How can we gain confidence in different types of records?

2. Good research practice, where we confess mistakes we have made when starting out. Sort of like What Not To Wear, only for Genealogy. [Topic for 12/14/2013]

3. I'm in the midst of reviewing my prior research, and would enjoy discussing workflow and effective ways to do a review with others. Would this be a good chat topic? What are the advantages of reviewing all the source material for one person as a group? Of transcribing all the census records for the same town in a particular census year, and examining them as a group? Of looking at a set of siblings all at once? And so on. [Topic for 1/4/2014]

4. Is that odd bit of information a discrepancy, or an important clue? (used as a launching point for sharing case histories) When do you decide to let it go? [Topic for 1/25/2014]

5. Netiquette. Another user on Ancestry has a person who matches someone on my tree, and the sources attached to that person are from Mars (their sources disagree with one another ). It looks like push-button-itis. Do I contact them, and if so, what do I say? How do you talk with tact about the fact that two trees wildly disagree and avoid barging in and saying, "look here, you're all wrong". Or is it better to just ignore them, and let them come to you? [Topic for 17 May 2014]

P.S. Copied from chat:

Martin Sojka Jul 15, 1:16 I wish we had a proper genealogy-specific search engine. Something which on a name would find just the relevant records, both original and on sites like MyHeritage, FamilySearch and WikiTree.

What a proper genealogy-specific search engine might look like -- or what a proper search engine for a service like Ancestry, FindMyPast, WorldVitalRecords, etc. might look like -- that could fill many chats. Many. Well, I could fill them, anyway. [Topic for 12 April 2014]

Edited to add: I'm new to SE, so feel free to point me to any guidelines.

Answer 3

Desktop vs Web [Topic for 21st June 2014]

If you still use desktop tree software, why? What do popular web products lack that your desktop product offers?

Answer 4

[Topic for 10/5/2013]

I have an idea for a chat topic... Genealogy Travel.
People learn from people. It'd be interesting to hear how people set themselves up to succeed on a research trip. Do they start planning 6 months in advance? Do they tack on research to a trip that is mainly for other purposes such as business? How would that affect planning, how do you know what to search for first and where to search for it? ...What is more important, getting a hotel with a great TripAdvisor rating, or one that is across the street from the archives? I'd like some recommendations that come through hard-won experience.
I also think that it would be fun to hear some horror stories or celebration stories. "The best genealogy trip I ever had was..., because..." or "the one thing I will always bring with me is..., because once this happened to me..." This is the kind of thing that you can't do in a SE question. Maybe there are things that people always do now, because they learned the hard way on a trip once.
I think that travelling can be intimidating. I also think that phoning an archives or making contact with an historical society can be intimidating... Do successful genealogists get over this fear and make a bunch of calls before they go?
The topic could be looked at from many angles.

Answer 5

What's on your Genealogy Bookshelf? [Topic for 1/18/2014]

What books do you find invaluable in your research -- perhaps 'how to' books about methodology, or reference works specific to a country or topic.

We don't do book recommendations in the Q&A section, but we can do them in chat!

Answer 6

Would anyone else be interested in a once-a-month brainstorming session?

• The site just went through self-evaluation. For the questions which were marked "needs improvement" could chat be a vehicle by which we all focus on the same question at once and write up a better answer as a Community Wiki?
• One of my local sewing shops offers a class where people can bring in their unfinished projects and work on them, and get advice from a teacher (and presumably other classmates). I'm having a problem figuring out exactly which microfilm I need to order for a couple of records I want to look at. This seems too persnickety for a regular G&FH.SE question, but I would appreciate having someone to look over the FHL Catalog record with me. Is this something for which chat would be better?

Answer 7

Stay-at-home Genealogy [Topic for 19th July 2014]

Not all of us have the budget for genealogy travel. Making the most of the internet and local research avenues is important. Share and receive tips on how to conduct thorough research locally and efficiently.

Answer 8

How can we graduate Beta sooner rather than later? [Topic for 26 July 2014]

We are fast approaching our 600th day as a Beta site of Stack Exchange.

Our Beta Site Stats Summary is available to review so let's brainstorm any ideas you may have to help put us further along the road to graduation.

Our visits per day (492) is not far off the 500 per day that would see us lift from red to amber but our questions per day (1.3) is well below the 5 per day that would be needed to do likewise for that measure.

Do we just need to post/encourage more questions in order for everything else to flow? Are we getting the right kind of questions to encourage more posting of others? Are we getting the right kind of answers to encourage more posting of questions?

Is a focus on more questions the right approach or would you like to suggest alternatives?

Answer 9

Working towards the Genealogical Proof Standard

[Topic for 12 July 2014]

The Board for Certification of Genealogists says:

Proof is a fundamental concept in genealogy. In order to merit confidence, each conclusion about an ancestor must have sufficient credibility to be accepted as "proved." Acceptable conclusions, therefore, meet the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS). The GPS consists of five elements:

• a reasonably exhaustive search;
• complete and accurate source citations;
• analysis and correlation of the collected information;
• resolution of any conflicting evidence; and
• a soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion.

In your day-to-day research into genealogy and family history do you apply this strictly, work towards it when possible, or perhaps do it already without realising that way of working had a name?

Answer 10

What tools (that aren't specialist family history tools) are useful in conducting or publishing your research? [Topic for week of 20 Sep 2014]

I've seen mention of Scrivener and Outwit -- have you found these useful? And — thinking outside the genealogy box — what else have you used that might be useful to others?

Answer 11

More ideas:

• What's on your To Do List?
• What kind of records on your Research Map are marked "Here Be Dragons"?
• What are some of your "wow" records (that you were really excited to find)? [Topic for 1/11/2014]
• If I Were Dictator: things I would change about online genealogy sites
• What's in your library? (essential Genealogy Books) <== Community Wiki Bait [Topic for 1/18/2014]
• Essential Websites <== Community Wiki Bait [Topic for 2/1/2014]

I'd also like to see a series of hosted discussions (not necessarily part of the weekly chat) on technical topics. For instance -- last weekend while I was hanging out in chat and working in another window, I did a Google search on persona records and ended up reading a lot of blog posts and forum discussions written by participants here on G&FH.se. Could we do something like a Reddit Ask Me Anything where a volunteer makes him/herself available for questions? The software developers could sound off about their software, I could talk about how my linguistics experience has informed my family history research, and so on. Obviously a person couldn't hang out the entire 24 hour chat window but they could be there for a few hours, and people could leave questions which could be answered later as time permitted. I think the Reddit AMAs are a couple of hours.

Answer 12

Making Time for Genealogy [Topic for 2/8/2014]

For most of us, genealogy is a hobby not a profession. How do you we fit it in among all the other demands on our time -- our families, our jobs, our communities, our other interests. We can share tips and tricks for making time, and for using that time effectively.

Answer 13

Tracing the Female Lines [Topic for 14th June 2014]

There are unique challenges to tracing the female line, at least in Western cultures. Name changes (sometimes many of them) every generation. Relative lack of property records. Not named in many birth and marriage registers.

What are the tips and tricks you've used when tracing the women in your ancestry? And what are the stand-out stories you've leanred about those women?

Answer 14

Starting Over? Why and When? [Topic for 28 June 2014]

If you spend any time in the genealogy/family history corners of the Internet, sooner or later you'll encounter somebody 'Starting over' -- re-tracing and re-recording their research.

When is this a good idea, and why? Or are there better ways to deal with the perceived problems of (among others) poor citations, lack of consistency in using the features of your software, realising that for the last 10 years you've been researching completely the wrong line....

Answer 15

Using Geography Tools to research and display our Family History

Displaying where our ancestors lived, and how they moved about, can be surprisingly revealing. We can talk about using tools such as ArcGIS (or others) to display our ancestor's stories. And about the pitfalls of encoding geographical info within our genealogy databases.

Answer 16

Re: the question: Personal family history website with rich media support?

Discussing the pros/cons of using the various existing services for social connections and genealogy collaboration (e.g. Facebook, Google Groups) might be a good topic for a weekly chat that could be mined for a Community Wiki Q/A.

Answer 17

Improving the Weekly Chat [Topic for week beginning 13 September 2014]

Posting a new answer here to call attention to the Meta Q Improving The Weekly Chat. If you haven't seen that Q and the various As, please take a look and post your thoughts.

My current idea for next week's chat (tongue-in-cheek, to be sure) is to find a better name for the Weekly Chat room.

Answer 18

• After Gae­no­vium 2014 (which is coming up in October 2014) please can we have a post-conference chat with speakers @ACProctor and @lkessler and any other developers who attended the conference?
• For a more general topic, we could have a chat on conferences in general -- which ones have we attended, were they helpful, which conferences put sessions online for viewing afterwards or make their syllabuses available for download, and so on.
• Another related topic: what we do for 'ongoing education' either formal or informal. What blogs / Hangouts / newsletters / etc. are useful to keep up with for current events and so on.
• Beyond the Person: Using geographically-based websites e.g Curious Fox.
• Beyond the Person: Using record-based websites e.g. Lost Cousins.