Wednesday at SLIG: the pace picks up

As the week goes on, there's more happening and less time for non-essentials like blogging and sleeping. And some of what's going on is, well, secret, like Tom Jones's mind-bending evidence-evaluation homework assignment. (Just don't sneak up behind me and say "Spotsylvania," OK?)

Even meals take on lives of their own. Two years ago on my first trip to Salt Lake City and SLIG, Leroy Atkins kindly guided me through the maze to the busy, inexpensive, and nourishing cafeteria in the basement of the Church Office Building. A group of us returned there today. On the way out we crowded into an elevator and kept on talking until somebody pointed out that no one had pushed the button to get back upstairs. (We weren't late to class, but it would have been difficult to formulate the excuse!) Supper was a gathering of ProGen Study Group and Transitional Genealogist Forum folks, accidentally coinciding with crowds who came downtown for the Utah Jazz game.

Institute-goers have a way of referring to courses by the name of the course coordinator, but some of the teaching load is carried by colleagues the coordinator brings in. I've heard Rick Sayre lecture before but I'm always surprised. I swear he doesn't talk fast, doesn't seem in a hurry, and yet all of a sudden I'm inundated with places to go and things to do and half a page behind in my note-taking or marking up the syllabus!

This day we had an unforgettable word tour of the back rooms of the world's largest map collection (Library of Congress). And his Allegheny County Fassbinder research saga makes me want to drop everything, leave my Indiana home, and spend a month camping in Pittsburgh, combining maps and city directories to put the question to my wife's grandmother's fantastically elusive ancestors there. He got the line of the day too: Maps are to genealogists as canvas is to artists, they're "something we paint our genealogy on."

Tuesday at SLIG: old things new

I know it's a good genealogy day when I'm seeing supposedly familiar things in a new light:

* indirect evidence (we won't go there, but it kept me up late!),

* the value of fraud and failure (they generated records!),

* federal records (I appreciate being encouraged to take another run at these fantastically underutilized sources, and I'm sure I'll need more),

* how to augment a lecture with chewy treats, and

* my great-great grandfather (who was 25 years old in 1834, and evidently didn't care any more for Andrew Jackson than I do).

When you're picking an institute to attend, it's not hard to evaluate the faculty -- if nothing else, most people know them. It's harder to evaluate the students ahead of time, but it's important, if only because the greatest faculty in the world can only do so much with people who don't get it or aren't ready. SLIG is full of fellow students who do and who are. "So many people, so few meals."

Monday at SLIG: shifting gears

(Thanks to Christy for the invitation to guest-blog here during this week of the 2011 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.)

I've found myself switching gears again on my second SLIG trip . . .

. . . from the wet snowy Midwest to crisp dry Utah (well, not always so crisp with the inversion);

. . . from smaller-scale cities to monumental Salt Lake City with its endless blocks, double-wide streets, and mountains!;

. . . from the Allen County Public Library to the Family History Library (at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude!);

. . . and now on the first day, from intense research (learning how NOT to use a digital camera on microfilm) to intense instruction (learning how much I do NOT understand evidence) to intense conversation with friends about both of the above, as well as the state of the profession. Two years ago we were big-eyed newbies, now we all have responsibilities beyond sitting in class. Two of my classmates from the 2009 SLIG have joined the august ranks of the evening lecturers.

I'm taking Tom Jones's Course 9, "Advanced Methodology," so naturally I thought he had the best line of the day:

"Evidence does not exist in the absence of a research question."

Maybe you had to be there. I'm glad I am.

-- Harold Henderson
librarytraveler@gmail.com
midwestroots.net