BCG Skillbuilding at NGS 2013: Elizabeth Mills on “Information Overload? Effective Project Planning, Research, Data Management, and Analysis”

Please welcome guest blogger Harold Henderson, CG^SM

© 2013 by the National Genealogical Society, Inc. Used by permission of the National Genealogical Society and the photographer, Scott Stewart.

More often than we like to admit, we attend conference lectures and leave with a feeling of enjoyment or illumination … but it does not necessarily carry over when we return the following week to all the neglected tasks of real genealogical life. Elizabeth Shown Mills’s Thursday afternoon presentation is one that I will be checking back to repeatedly.

As the author of Evidence Explained (both book and instructional web site), BCG past president, and current trustee, she needs no introduction or advertisement, but she was in great form at NGS Las Vegas speaking on “Information Overload?” Those of us who struggle not just with information overload in general, but with a wealth of information about research targets’ friends, associates, and neighbors, would benefit from her clear thoughts and detailed suggestions. (Was I just more ready for it, or are the suggestions more detailed than ever?) One way to look at the key problem: since genealogy software focuses on one individual at a time, how do we study groups, especially since that is what we often end up doing? Examples of her solutions are available in the work samples section of the BCG web site.

This session has been taped. During the conference you can buy it from the JAMB-INC booth in the main conference hall. After the conference, it will be available online at http://www.jamb-inc.com/category/genealogy. This is session T241 under the heading 2013 NGS Conference/Las Vegas, NV.

Harold Henderson, CG^SM, has been a professional writer since 1979, a professional genealogist since 2009, and a board-certified genealogist since June 2012. He lives and works in northwest Indiana and at midwestroots.net.  See Harold’s new work Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist’s Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center viewable online as a pdf here.