GeoLife: DNA-Conference
March 2001
Needless to say, I was glad to be on the road to Salt Lake City to my Genealogy conference and away from health problems for a few days.
Now the next five days had ups and downs. The down side was taking my computer to son T-Jay for major overhaul. There was something causing my Netscape to default back to Blue Screen, We decided it was time to upgrade my Windows NT to Windows 2000 NT.
That is another story , classical I suppose, for upgrades. The process is always expensive as it requires new drivers, updated programs and in my case a new scanner since mine was not upgradable. Before we were through I had to replace the second SCD drive and the modum.
Conference was all on one floor and easy for us to get to. I drooled a lot as I browsed in the new programs stalls ...everything to do with computer genealogy. The sessions were superb, as they were given by the professionals from the LDS Genealogical Society and other professionals such as Allen Mann and Barbara Renick.
As I waited for the afternoon session to start on the first day, there was a young man who came and sat down beside me. May I interview you ? he ask. Somewhat surprised I replied sure, ... he could.
Tell me how you got started using the computer for genealogy he ask
Now ...little did he know the tale he was going to get. So my usual, ... its time to perform, front seat sitter, personality took over and I took him back to 1985-6 when I bought my little Apple 2C.- 28K of ram computer. I explained that I was a one finger typist at that point, knowing nothing about computers. I knew less about the new PAF program that was supposed to reside in the little monster. Since I was Director of the Family History Center in College Station Texas, I figured it was up to me to learn. There was not one person in the locality that knew about PAF.
I set out and taught myself the program and began teaching anyone who was interested. There were really strong County Genealogical Societies in several of the counties and they soon got on to the fact that I could come to them and speak and teach genealogy. This was reciprocall as they in turn came our way and helped man the Family History Center. The Regional DAR coordinator was a best friend from the staff at school where I worked. She jumped in with both feet to help. She also taught genealogy in the Community College. We had a family history center that was a power house. I was in Texas 10 years before I retired.
Since retirement in 1989, I have worked in the Regional and Stake FHC and directed the Stake Family Records Extraction Program. I told the young man interviewing me, ...we had been able to get a grant from Bill Gates to place 4 computers in the local Public Library and I volunteered there to teach anyone interested in Internet Genealogy. We were also successful in doing home based Internet Genealogy in the home, where they could work on their own computer and we were sucessful teaching Senior Citizens. He ask if they could really learn on the computer? I replied, ...working with seniors took a lot of patience and support.
He ask if I thought the old fashion way of researching was a thing of the past? I told him of course it is still the same for those who prefer to go that route. The Readily Available Resources, on CD-Rom, gives freedom from the tedium of microfilm and fisc, for much of the research of vital records.
I suggested that the new tech. , gave us the freedom of a digitally operated thrashing machine in a huge wheat field. Why go back to using a scythe when we had the modern equipment at hand. To my surprise he wrote an article for the BYU newspaper about me ...just me, out of all the people in conference.
31 Mar 2001 Copyright © by Georgene Humphries
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