First I need to apologize for not posting this yesterday.  After attending the classes I wanted, I went to dinner with my husband, then went to the Geneabloggers Ice Cream Social which was sponsored by Geni and by the time I got home I was dead tired and went to bed.  My cell phone battery also died early in the day so I wasn’t able to take any pictures nor tweet anything from the conference.   Today, however, I came prepared!  I have my phone charger with me so that I could plug it into my computer to charge and I have included down time in today’s schedule so that I will have time to blog.

My first class on Friday was 12-Step checklist to Using Your Genealogy Computer Program by Geoffrey d. Rasmussen.  I am so very glad that I took this class.  It was on genealogy programs in general but because it was sponsored by Legacy, Inc, they used Legacy 7.0 (my genealogy program) for the examples in the presentation.  Because of this, I was able to learn more about my program and that was what I was hoping would happen.  I learned that there is a way to customize not only the toolbar but also the fields within the program to what I need.  I also learned of a website called AniMap which is helpful for verifying the county within any US State for any given year.   I really took a lot from this class and I enjoyed it very much.

My second class was Using AmericanAncestors.org with David Allen Lambert, NEHGS Online Genealogist.  First Mr. Lambert is a very good speaker and keep the room engaged in his presentation.  He spoke about how to use the NEHGS’ website, AmericanAncestors.org to get better results.  Because of Steve’s New England ancestry, this class was very helpful to my research.  I learned the databases that is available on AmericanAncestors.org and I also learned that if you email Mr. Lambert, he does email back.

My third and last class for the day was Central Mexico with John P. Schmal.  To be honest, I didn’t expect  much from this class.  There were hardly any classes on Mexico at this conference but I took the ones they did have.   I have been told be several people that mexico records are few and far in between because they are not up to date with the technology of today and are not digitized.  I let others discourage me in my mexican research.  Mr. Schmal however, gave me hope.  He said that yes, they are not as technically advances as others are and that their records are not available online, but they are still available.  He gave me tips on how to better search for the records and where to look.  I now have renewed faith for my mexican research, now….just to get the patience!

In all, the first day of the 2011 Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree conference has been a hit!  I had been able to get a seat in all of my classes and only one of them filled up to capacity.  This first day was a great day!