Genealogists write. Their written narratives include stories of ancestral families, biographies of individual ancestors, and explanations supporting genealogical proofs. For their writing to succeed, genealogists—like all effective writers—repeatedly self-edit everything they write. The process results in polished products that the genealogist’s readers will understand, enjoy, and cherish. Emphasizing genealogical narrative, these two webinars will addresses the self-editing process. Part 1 will focus on “big-picture” editing, including stages of self-editing; focus; keeping the writer out of the narrative; editing the writing’s overall structure, organization, and flow; and improving major and minor subdivisions of written genealogical narratives, including paragraphing. Part 2 will focus on “nitty-gritty” editing, including capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, word choice, and reducing word count.

Genealogists write. Their written narratives include stories of ancestral families, biographies of individual ancestors, and explanations supporting genealogical proofs. For their writing to succeed, genealogists—like all effective writers—repeatedly self-edit everything they write. The process results in polished products that the genealogist’s readers will understand, enjoy, and cherish. Emphasizing genealogical narrative, these two webinars will address the self-editing process. Part 1 will focus on “big-picture” editing, including stages of self-editing; focus; keeping the writer out of the narrative; editing the writing’s overall structure, organization, and flow; and improving major and minor subdivisions of written genealogical narratives, including paragraphing. Part 2 will focus on “nitty-gritty” editing, including capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, word choice, and reducing word count.

As researchers, family historians, compilers, bloggers, or writers of other ilk, genealogists face legal and ethical perils they often do not anticipate. This crash course offers practical guidance to enhance your skills and keep you safe as you explore history, reconstruct lives, and “write up” your findings. While the issues are serious—from the legal issue of copyright to the ethical issue of plagiarism—the lessons are taught with a light heart and humor.

Research reports are not just for professionals, but are a great tool for anyone who wants to answer their research questions. Write a research report to yourself to organize your thoughts, analyze the evidence, document your findings, and solve your puzzles. Using an example from the Netherlands, this presentation demonstrates how you can organize a research report to spot more clues in records, discover and resolve discrepancies, and build reliable conclusions.

Come see a variety of tools available in genealogy research software Goldie May. Organize your research into projects, keep an automatic research log (seriously!), write citations easily, analyze your research, quickly navigate to relevant record collections, and untangle knots in your family tree. Keep the family tree software you already have and see how Goldie May can help you with organization, visualization, and quick navigation.

What do we do with ancestors whose names don’t “match” from one record to the next? Or those who pose the opposite problem: too many men or women of the same name? This session examines a litany of social customs and naming patterns that cause ancestors to be known by different names—then offers techniques and strategies by which we can establish that any two records do or do not apply to the same person. A variety of case studies demonstrate the problems and the methods we can use to overcome them.

Cette session, présentée par Elisabeth Zetland, membre de l’équipe de Recherche, vous montrera comment MyHeritage peut vous aider à trouver vos ancêtres et des parents à l’étranger grâce aux fonctionnalités et outils de l’arbre et de la recherche. Une sélection de collections internationales disponibles sera également fournie.

You’ve recorded that video or audio interview, now what? This presentations builds on the best practices covered in Colleen’s part one webinar. We will explore ideas and tools for trimming out mistakes or sensitive content, and for adding a title screen and ending credits screen before sharing with others. We will also look at ways to enhance your recordings by weaving in relevant supporting visual imagery like photos, maps, and historical documents. Finally we will review options for generating full text transcriptions of your interviews.

Explore your New Zealand family history a little further and add to your family story.