Saturday, December 11, 2010

Another Saturday at SAG

It's a bit of a lifelong learning overload for me at the moment. Last Saturday I attended the "From Ireland to here" at SAG and today I returned for two more educational sessions.

The Society of Australian Genealogists offers an excellent program of talks, meetings and seminars for both members and non-members in Sydney. I commend their program to anyone who lives within cooee of Sydney. I have been a fairly inactive member of the Society for a number of years but recently decided that my commitment to lifelong learning would be enhanced by attendance at some of their events.

This morning I attended "Sussex Online and Online Parish Clerks" a talk by SAG member, Linda Bishop. It was Linda's first presentation for SAG and she was understandably nervous when she started. However, once she got into her topic she relaxed and impressed the audience with her knowledge of resources pertinent to Sussex. Initially Linda discussed her work as a voluntary OPC (Online Parish Clerk) for Shipley in Sussex. Linda gave an indepth tour of the Shipley pages and pointed out that by "clicking on everything" one might stumble across resources relevant to one's research. She exhorted us to consider helping the OPC project by either becoming Online Parish Clerks or submitting transcriptions of records to the appropriate parishes on the OPC sites.

Linda provided a wonderful handout of online resources some of which were pertinent to Sussex and some of which, such as Vision of Britain,  have information on many counties. I now need time to research my few Sussex ancestors on the sites Linda suggested. Linda, who has a great depth of knowledge about Sussex, generously offers lookups in her personal library to those who contact her via the Shipley page.

After Linda's talk those who were attending the TMG Sydney User Group meeting repaired to the cafe on the corner for lunch. The group is led by Kerry Farmer who initially welcomed new members and  then led a discussion that planned the agendas for the groups meetings in 2011. There was not a formal program for today's meeting; it was a BYOL (Bring your own laptop) day. After identifiying a number of issues that group members wanted to discuss we split up into groups and, under the tutelage of  experienced users of the package, discussed ways in which various features of the TMG  program could be applied. I was in Carole Riley's group that discussed focus groups, flags and accents and ways to record census data and emigration and immigration. I have been using this program for many years and am still a beginner; by attending user group meetings I am able to see how others customise the program for their particular situations and learn how I can use the program for my situation.

Thanks to SAG, Linda and the TMG Sydney User Group for providing me with rich learning experiences today.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sounds like I missed a great day at Sydney TMG and SAG - it is sometimes inconvenient when family members arrange weddings that interfere with my genealogy hobby!! But then, I've now added more family members, with photos, to my database - so it's not all bad! Thanks, Jill.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...