Genealogy center hosts free lecture and open house
Jan Stiegman, a Carson City resident, professional genealogist, family history lecturer, and a former volunteer instructor in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, UT, will be presenting a lecture entitled “Any Family History that is Not Sourced is Mythology.”
The importance of sourcing all data will be stressed, and training of how to do so will be offered.
The free and open to the public lecture will be held March 25 th at 10:30 am in the Carson City Family History Center situated in the northeast corner of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints building located at 411 Saliman Road in Carson City.
Genealogy, the study of one’s ancestry, also referred to as family history, was used for centuries to prove a lineage of nobility, but now has become one of America’s favorite past-times.
According to ABC News, it’s second only to gardening. Family history is a billion-dollar industry that includes direct-to- consumer DNA kits, numerous family history records websites, and even television programs that showcase celebrities’ journey to find their roots.
Interest in family history has exploded in the past two decades as access to digitized records on the internet has made finding one’s family easier than ever.
As interest in genealogy increases and website interfaces become more user friendly, entering data into family pedigree databases is no longer limited to experts.
The average person can add names and dates to his line from the comfort of his own living room. However, the growing millions of beginner hobby genealogists mean more human error.
The greatest errors are those resulting from a lack of sourcing. The only way to know if Grandma Jean was truly born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1925 is to prove it with a document such as a birth certificate or a census record.
Most of these records are viewable from family history websites such as FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com, but if users do not link each name and date to these sources, their information cannot be trusted.
Stiegman recalls her grandmother wrote down, from memory, the names and birth and death dates of her ancestry and compiled it into a small book to distribute to her descendants.
After doing actual research on that line of her family, Stiegman found that her grandmother’s account “didn’t hold much water.”
Without accurate names, dates, and places Grandma’s stories are just that, stories. A lack of sourcing leads to confusion and really impedes the progress of accurate genealogy.
The lecture will serve as the re-launch of the Carson City Family History Center. The center has a full complement of genealogy resources including free access to online research tools, that otherwise require a paid subscription.
There are also volunteer experts on hand to guide both novice genealogists and those who are more experienced but have hit a brick wall in their ongoing search of family.
The center’s normal operating business hours are 2-8 p.m. on Tuesdays and 4-8 p.m. on Wednesdays or by appointment.
Jan Stiegman’s lecture will be the first of several free lectures and classes aimed at aspiring genealogists.
To learn more about the genealogical library in Carson City go here.
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