Keeping Up With Susan

As Daylight Savings Time nears, I definitely feel as though I am ready to Spring Forward! The last few weeks have been an incredibly busy time for me. I thought I'd share some of what I've been up to.

LLCGS

This Sunday, March 11, 2012 I will be speaking about genealogy blogging at the monthly program of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Genealogical Society (LLCGS). The meeting begins at 2 p.m. at Walt Branch Library in Lincoln. The following Sunday, March 18, I will be on hand to provide some one-on-one technical assistance to help genealogists create their own blog. I hope that a few members will be interested enough to show up! Same time, same place.

On March 25, 2012, LLCGS will be having an orientation session/kick-off celebration for the 1940 Census. Lori Cox-Paul from the National Archives is scheduled to talk and a lot of other exciting events are in store. Our program chair, Judi Cook, is doing a bang-up job pulling this all together. I may be bringing some 1940s music and probably demo the promotional videos that have been developed for local societies to use to promote the release of the census and the indexing project. I've even managed to squeeze in some time indexing some World War I registration records.

And while speaking about LLCGS, I've been very busy as the new volunteer publicity chair, establishing our society's presence in the social networking sites. We now have a Facebook page, a blog, a page on Google+ and a Twitter feed. Please feel free to visit any of those sites and sign up to follow LLCGS! LLCGS debuted its new web page in January. Al Harlow and his team are doing a great job of maintaining the site and Judi is keeping everyone updated with all of the notices of meetings and education opportunities. After consuming so much from the genealogy community for so long, it really feels good to give something back. And LLCGS has a lot of great members to work with.

Lincoln 55+

It's hard for me to believe that I've been writing for the Lincoln 55+ Seniors Paper for a year now! My latest article on Internet resources for genealogy appears on page 14 of the Spring issue.

Kindle for Genealogy

I really didn't have enough to do, so about three weeks ago, I set up a Facebook group for we Kindle Fire Freaks (and users of the older Kindle, with a few Nook folks there as well). The group is called Kindle for Genealogy. We got quite a few members right off the start, then Cyndi Howells of Cyndi's List added our group to her ever growing list and now there are more than 100 of us sharing information about ebooks, apps, tips and tricks. If you're a Kindle user, come on over and join the party!

For my day-job, I'm embarking on about 15 training workshops across the state during April and May. By the time it's over, we should have trained about 500 people. So, no, I am NOT doing any genealogy speaking during those two months!

Just in case you were wondering why I haven't blogged as much lately, it's certainly not because I've been laying around watching soap operas and eating bon bons. With the state conference coming up in Grand Island in May, the Family History Expo in Kearney in September, and then Hank Jones speaking at the LLCGS conference in Lincoln in October, it's shaping up to be a fantastic, genealogy-filled year!

Hope to see you somewhere down the road . . .