Last night I attended the FamilySearch Blogger/Media dinner at the Hyatt hotel in Cincinnati. A great time was had by all and FamilySearch provided a tasty meal. It was all things Cincinnati from chili three ways, ribs, fried chicken and fresh kettle chips. Dessert was an ice cream sandwich made with cookies.
I enjoyed the company of Karen Blackmore of Karen’s Genealogy Oasis, Karen Miller Bennett of Karen’s Chatt, Lisa Lisson of Are You My Cousin?, Julia Langel of GeneaJulia, David Rencher who is the Chief Genealogical Officer at FamilySearch, Merrill White who is a FamilySearch Patron and Partner Services, Britnay Warnock FamilySearch Social Media and Brian Speckart of findmypast.com.
Paul Nuata started the presentation by telling us that they now have a contract to digitize the civil registration records from 1802 to 1940 for Italy.
Every day 10,000 support volunteers are available online at familysearch.org to help answer research questions and provide personalized research guidance. They can respond to questions in 13 different languages.
Jim Erickson of FamilySearch gave us a great presentation on the accomplishments of the 1940 US Census indexers. They are enthusiastic and moving along at a fast rate to get the project finished.
There are 3.8 million images in the 1940 US census project. FamilySearch hope to have 400 million new images online in 2012. The Granite Mountain Vault holds 3.5 billion images.
FamilySearch are working on some new technological innovations to improve the indexing and searching capabilities of the website.
The BillionGraves.com index will be available on FamilySearch in the coming weeks and they will be announcing a new project for Memorial Day.
After the presentation everyone stayed around to chat and catch up. I met Amanda Perrine of Amanda’s Anthenaeum we share the same blog anniversary. I also met Dear Mrytle and Pam Schaffner of the Digging Down East blog.
This is just the start of a wonderful week filled with all things genealogy. Today is the first full day of lectures and the market place opens at 9:30. If you are attending please drop by and see me at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies booth.
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It was a fantastic evening! We had a wonderful time (and the ice cream was a huge hit!) Wonderful food, friends, and information.
It was a great night Stephanie. The ice cream was really good. Hope to meet up with you some time during the conference.
Hi, Ruth,
Glad to hear the you are enjoying yourself at NGS. I look forward to additional posts!
Thanks for the news about FamilySearch. It sounds like they are really going forward with new projects – nothing about Canada, though. Always looking for news about Canada at FamilySearch!
Elizabeth
Thanks Elizabeth. The conference was great. I had a little problem with the wifi so wasn’t able to post much from the conference. There are many posts about the conference that will be online over the next few weeks.