Mark Your Calendars - UVPAFUG Meeting!

UTAH VALLEY PAF USERS GROUP MEETING

The next regular, second-Saturday-of-the-month meeting of the Utah Valley PAF (Personal Ancestral File) Users Group will be on Saturday, 8 Jan 2011, from 9 am to noon in the LDS "Red Chapel", 4050 North Timpview Drive (650 East), Provo. Information about the Users Group, main presentations, classes, and class notes are available on the Group website http://uvpafug.org and the press releases are at http://blog.uvpafug.org/ .

The main presentation for this meeting will be by Barbara Renick on EPUBLISHING. 

Genealogists are motivated to preserve and share what they have found and by publishing they open their work to peer review (critique) which often brings to light possible errors and additional resources. Today there are two approaches to publishing: low or no cost electronic publishing (for part or all of research summaries and family history books) and the use of the Internet to find and manage the best paper publishing options. This presentation will be an extensive discussion of electronic publishing media, including online library catalogs with Web 2.0 user-added-content, different types of Wikis and Web sites, blogs, digitized books online, plus publishing to CDs and DVDs. 

Barbara Renick is a nationally known genealogy lecturer who lectures frequently at national and local genealogy conferences. She currently serves on staff and teaches at the LDS Regional Family History Center in Orange, California. She writes for several genealogy publications and has written several genealogy books, her most recent one being Genealogy 101: How to Trace Your Family's History and Heritage. That book was sponsored by the National Genealogical Society for their 100th Anniversary. 

She is also well known for the 'Z' Links page at her website http://www.zroots.com/ which is a favorite tool for many people. Her maiden name was Zuknick and she was born in Maryland to a German immigrant father and and a Tennessee hillbilly mother. She had a four-year scholarship in electrical engineering with an eye toward designing computers, but ended up graduating from BYU in nursing in 1974. After purchasing her first computer in 1983 she was asked to train and supervise a crew of workers for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for data entry of the International Genealogical Index and the Ancestral File. She teaches many family history classes, writes many family history articles, and is a frequent alpha and beta tester for software programs and Internet sites.

Following the main presentation there will be several classes about family history and technology with something for everyone at any level of expertise. The teachers and classes presently scheduled for this meeting are as follows: 

1. Scandinavian Research on the Internet, by Rick Mathews
2. Fun Ideas for Family History Consultants, by Bret Petersen
3. Personalized Family History Help, by Claudia Benson & Finn Hansen
4. Making A List and Checking it Twice, by Barbara Renick
5. Video of last month's main presentation: Introduction to Waypointing, by Travis Mecham
6. MAC: Uploading to Ancestry and Creating a Web Site, by Ron Snowden
7. Ancestral Quest, by Gaylon Findlay & Merlin Kitchen
8. Family Insight, by Andrea Schnakenburg
9. Legacy, by Joel Graham
10. RootsMagic, by Bruce Buzbee.

All meetings of the Users Group are open to the public whether members of the Group or not. The Users Group has the goal of helping individuals use technology to further their family history and there are usually 100-125 attending the monthly meetings on the second Saturdays. The officers are Gerhard Ruf, President; Don Snow, 1st VP; Laurie Castillo, 2nd VP; Liz Kennington, PAFology Editor; Kay Baker, Gerry Eliason, and Don Engstrom working with finances and membership; and Bruce Merrill and Marie Andersen, working with the DVD Library. Several of these will be there to help with membership, answer questions, distribute the current issue of the monthly newsletter PAFology, and check out DVDs of past presentations and classes to members of the group. Information about the Users Group, presentations, classes, and class notes can be found at the websites mentioned above. For further information contact President Gerhard Ruf atpres@uvpafug.org (801-225-6106) or 1st VP Don Snow at snowd@math.byu.edu or 2nd VP Laurie Castillo at laurie@everythingisrelative.net.