There are a huge number of educational options that should be on every genealogist’s radar.
These opportunities can open up a wide variety of topics, many of which will never be available locally as a lecture. The January-March issue of the National Genealogical Society’s NGS Magazine covers many of these educational opportunities in an article by Julie Tarr.
She includes study groups (these you would set up locally) and webinars, which are offered by just about every genealogy group around, including NGS, the Georgia Genealogical Society, as well as the main genealogy group in most states.
Virtual courses are offered by NGS in several formats, and others are offered by Family Tree University and by Brigham Young University in Utah (byu.edu).
Online videos abound as well; they're available from the National Archives or search YouTube and then "genealogy." Many videos covering all sorts of topics are found at familysearch.org.
Virtual networking through social media is discussed in the article, with a long list of topic-specific sites, such as Facebook or Google Plus pages on technology for genealogy, genetic genealogy and German genealogy.
Blogs can be useful and to the point, and podcasts and radio shows are a category often overlooked; Tarr mentions those by genealogyguys.com, lisalouisecooke.com and Family Tree Magazine. You can find those for NGS via ngsgenealogy.org under "education."
Classes in Fayetteville
A series of free genealogy classes taught by Maureen Keillor is ongoing in Fayetteville at the LDS Building, 2021 Redwine Road. The series at the Family History Lab began in January and runs through Dec. 1. The classes are held 7-8:30 p.m. Tuesdays.
Topics to be covered include Georgia resources (April 14), military records (May 5), brick wall strategies (June 2) and using FamilySearch (July 7). Contact mskeillor@gmail.com for details.
Bible records
Family Bible records are a genealogy wild card: a great resource whose existence is never a given.
Two readers pointed out that you should always check any Bible that you find to see if anything is written in the margins or inside the front cover, since many families did not always write in the pages set aside for births, marriages and deaths. Also, check even a Gideon Bible; some families kept those and wrote family data in them.
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