Tuesday, February 8, 2011

I is a Techie

I have a great genealogy friend, maybe you know her, Tami Glatz.  Tami and I met in Texas at a conference.  Our hotel rooms were next door to each other and everyday we rode the elevator up and down.  We took the shuttle to and from the conference.  One day we introduced ourselves and decided to have dinner together.  We became friends.

During my absence from genealogy…well, let’s just say Tami wasn’t absent from genealogy, not one day. 

When I met up with Tami again at the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree this year she was “hanging with the cool kids.”  She had developed the Relatively Curious Toolbar and was  blogging her little heart out. 


Me?  I had never heard of blogging.  I didn’t tweet.  I had only just started a Facebook account.  I don’t know if Tami even realizes how primitive I was.  I said was…I should say am.

When I got my Facebook account Tami was my first friend.  I don’t know if she knows that.  I hadn’t heard from her in years and there she was.  Then at Jamboree she introduced me to so many wonderful people.  These genealogists are a new breed.  They understand technology. 
She introduced me to “Bloggers.”  I attended two workshop/panels on Blogging.  I’m trying to keep up or should I say catch up. But I fear I belong in the 19th century.  Or at least in the early 20th

I still write long hand letters.  I just learned how to spin, and it does not involve a bicycle.  I do own a computer and I do know how to e-mail.  I’ve been known to surf the web and I even know what a PDF is.

But blogging, now that I might be able to do, I thought.  After all I have a BA in Journalism.  I write.  That I know how to do. 

Now keep in mind that Jamboree was held in June, I had only decided to “go back to work” in April.  And here I am learning about things like blogging, tweeting, GPS systems and there use in genealogy, Google maps, and so many other things, my mind was reeling.  After all I was still trying to remember how to search out land records and mine deeds.
 
I came home fully intending to start blogging.  Then I started working for Ancestry.com’s Expert Connect.  My days became full.  I was working with clients again.  I was placing bids right and left.  I was writing reports and research plans.  I was working at my local Family History Center and I was attending meeting with my local society.  Where on earth do you fit in blogging? 

Maybe next month.

Then it was August and I attended the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Tennessee.  I met Dear Myrtle and became a part of a wonderful group called Geneaquilters.  We’re a group of genealogist who also love quilting.  Pat Richley-Erickson is our lynch pin.  She organizes wonderful quilt shop hops for us in whatever town we are in for a conference.  (So far we have had one in Tennessee and one in Utah.) She also encouraged me to blog.

At that conference I decided to work on getting my certification and aim for the goal of becoming a speaker.  So now on top of the client work and all that that brings with it I have to make time for classes and certification work. 

But I want to join the Techie revolution…maybe I’ll start blogging after the first of the year.

In January I attended the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy and took Paula Stuart Warren’s American Research class.  Wow, what an enormous amount of information.  I have about 600 new websites I must investigate.

Maybe I will start blogging after I check all of them out.

Ok, I have a confession to make.  Shhhh, don’t tell anyone.  Technology scares me a little…no that’s not the right word…it doesn’t scare me exactly, it intimidates me.  I’ve always been good friends with books.  I take comfort in libraries.  Now the “written word” is on a screen and that disconcerts me.  So this month I will be attending Roots Tech in Salt Lake City.

Now, Roots Tech scares me.  I don’t even know what half the classes are about.  What’s this about a cloud? 

Tami has promised to help me adapt to this new world.  In her effort to included me, she has allowed me to hang on her coat tails and “hang out with the cool kids”.  The bloggers; that special group of online journalist, for that is what they are.  Part of me feels right at home, after all I was a journalist.  I even used to have my own newspaper column.  But a blogger I am not. I keep meaning to become one but something is always getting in the way. 

How do they find the time?  Don’t these techie people eat?  Do they sleep?  It’s all I can do to read my e-mail and Facebook.  Sometimes I even manage to read a blog or two before I have to start work.  Now I’m supposed to write too?  I like sleeping and eating.

Yesterday Tami sent me an e-mail with a forward about a dinner and breakfast.  I needed to reply as soon as possible so they would know I was coming.  I replied and a very nice lady informed me that the dinner and breakfast was for journalists or bloggers only. 

WAIT….I meant to write a blog.  I used to be a journalist.  I want to go to the dinner and breakfast.  I LIKE TO EAT.

So here I am….entering the world of blogging. 
See you at the dinner.

1 comment:

  1. WELCOME to the wonderful world of blogging, DearKIM! Can't wait to see ya at RootsTech.

    ReplyDelete