“I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way”

– Linda Creed, The Greatest Love of All, made popular by Whitney Houston

OK, I know the eighties are over, but these lyrics echo well a sentiment I’ve often heard genealogists express: “We’ve got to find a way to get the younger generation interested in genealogy/family history! But how?”

I discussed this topic briefly with Randy Seaver during the Geneablogger Dinner at the recent SCGS Jamboree. Randy suggested that I consider the example of Elyse Doerflinger, seated at the table across from us. Twenty years young and currently a student at El Camino College, Elyse first became interested in genealogy about eight years ago:

“It all started with my aunt when I was 12 or 13.  She had discovered Ancestry.com and … I thought the facts she told me were so interesting. … Then, during a trip to Tennessee to visit my grandpa for the summer, I discovered so much about my family that I became permanently hooked.  Everyone was telling me stories and giving me information.”                                  (via Larry Lehmer’s blog, Passing It On)

So there’s one answer to the “How do we get kids interested” question — we simply nurture loving and positive relationships with our nieces, nephews and grandchildren and introduce them in a natural way to the pleasures of family history research. Many will listen politely and go no further, but a few, like Elyse, will become “hooked.”

I sensed another possible answer as the geneabloggers left the dinner later that night. I overheard Elyse remark that her mother had early on labeled her lovingly as “an old soul”. That struck me as an important insight. The same qualities of curiosity, selflessness and “wisdom beyond her years” that led her to feel so comfortable around her aunt and her grandfather might well have helped her feel excited to learn the stories of her deceased ancestors as well. So perhaps as genealogists (or as geneabloggers, society volunteers, conference organizers… whatever) we can foster and encourage activities that will specifically attract “old souls” like Elyse — the better to nurture them and welcome them into a supportive community.

At the same time, I think it’s important that young people interested in genealogy have the chance to socialize with others their own age who share their interests. Elyse notes that she met someone at Jamboree who was actually younger than her — Michael Melendez — when they both worked together at the “Kids Family History Camp” held the first morning of the Jamboree. The Youth Genealogists Association, of which Michael is the webmaster, strikes me as a tremendously promising organization in this regard. I would love to get behind it with some kind of modest corporate sponsorship. (Of course, we’ll need some revenue first!)

So where to go with all this? How about a session at next year’s Jamboree specifically aimed at genealogy enthusiasts in their teens and twenties? Or perhaps a panel discussion aimed at genealogy societies in which young people make up the panel and explain what attracted them to the field? Or at the very least, as several have already suggested, how about having Elyse be on the panel at next year’s Geneablogger Summit!

Whenever I attend genealogy conferences as an exhibitor, I look for chances to either visit extended family nearby or perform research regarding our various family lines. I don’t have any deceased ancestors that spent time in southern California, but my mother lives up the coast a ways, and she’s joining me at the Genlighten booth for the SCGS Jamboree this weekend.

We took the opportunity yesterday before the Jamboree got underway to tour several of the galleries at the Huntington Library in nearby San Marino. The highlight was definitely “Treasures Through Six Generations:  Chinese Painting and Calligraphy from the Weng Collection.” Basically a Chinese family has cultivated an impressive collection of art objects stretching back to the 15th century, preserved it and passed it on to succeeding generations, each of whom have added their own unique contributions. The family thus continues to honor their ancestors through fine art.

I was struck by the “Family Tree” highlighted in the gallery guide.  It looked a little different than the ones I’m used to. In particular, I noticed several arrows that appeared to tie branches of the family together laterally. The text accompanying the family tree explained what the arrows signified:

“Passing on the family name is of key importance in Chinese culture. The transfer of a son from one branch of a family to another by internal adoption, an old tradition very rarely practiced today, was essential in ensuring the survival of the family name and lineage. A father with several sons would bestow one on a brother who had none; ideally, every male would have an heir who would pass on the family name. The Weng family observed this practice (indicated here with arrows) for several generations.”

I found the tremendous importance this family placed on “the survival of the family name and lineage” simultaneously quaint and awe-inspiring. It helped me step back from the often inscrutable details of my various familial lines and briefly glimpse the larger picture of my shared heritage. I was motivated by the exhibit to worry a little less about filling in blanks on a pedigree chart and to invest a little more effort in reaching across generations to strengthen actual family ties. It also made me wonder if I’m leaving a legacy to my descendants anything like the one Weng Xincun left to his. Even if I can’t afford to build a world-class collection of Chinese art masterpieces, surely there’s something I can leave to future generations!

Just a few more potential “rush periods” left between class sessions at the Colorado Family History Expo. Soon I’ll be packing up the booth and heading to the airport to return to Chicago.

It’s been pleasantly hectic at the booth almost the whole time, so I’m only just now getting around to posting about my experiences. Here’s a list of personal observations from the Expo:

• Colorado is gorgeous and Loveland is no exception. The interplay of tall mountains and towering thunderstorms has been magnificent to watch (if not to drive through.)
• Holly and her crew at FHExpos have managed to pull off a successful conference, despite this being their first time in Colorado. Logistics have gone smoothly, booth traffic has been disproportionately high (nearly as good as at NGS, I’d estimate) and the attendance at my presentations has been surprisingly good.
• A lot of genealogists in Colorado (and even New Mexico) are interested in offering lookups from their local records. I’d estimate between 20 and 25 people indicated solid, detailed interest in becoming Genlighten lookup providers. That’s 2-3 times what we typically see at a regional-level gathering.
• At past FHExpos events, the balance of booth visitors has tilted more toward genealogy beginners looking to use Genlighten to find source documents. Here most of them have been interested in finding documents for others. I credit that shift to Holly’s efforts to get local genealogical societies involved. Both the Larimer County Genealogical Society and a collective of other Colorado and Wyoming Genealogical Socities are represented in the exhibit area. Their members have also given some well-attended presentations. This has raised the level of research experience among the attendees, in my opinion.
• Family History Center consultants seem hungry for how-to help with Footnote.com. They recognize its potential value, but have yet to find success with it for their own research. That makes it tough for them to recommend it to their patrons, even though it’s accessible at FHCs for free. One attendee at my talk asked if I’d write her FHC a “manual” on how to use Footnote. Maybe someone (not me!) needs to do that.
• Just as the “Genealogy Demographic” has turned to Facebook, they now seem willing to explore Twitter. Will they be turned off by the increasing levels of spam on the site? Very possibly. But if they could post their genealogy queries and questions to Twitter and receive “real-time” help from their followers, I think they’d join in droves. Facilitating that kind of interaction is definitely on Genlighten’s product development roadmap.
• Our MiFi Wireless hotspot has provided reliable internet connectivity throughout the Expo, whether in my hotel room, at the exhibit booth, or in the presentation venues. The amount I’ve saved on wireless charges this trip has already offset the initial purchase price.

Time to pack up the booth and hit the road. Next on the Genlighten schedule? The Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree in Burbank, California, June 26th-28th.

I’ve signed up for Google to email me an alert when Genlighten appears in Google results on the web. I received an alert just now pointing to Quantcast results for Genlighten in May. Here’s the graph that appears:

A few thoughts sparked by this graph:

• The results here would be more encouraging if they weren’t obviously the result of our Google AdWords experiment in May, combined with our mention in Family Tree Magazine’s blog during that same time frame.
• We’ve already passed the peak of this spike.
• I wonder who typed Genlighten into Quantcast to generate the Google alert? Who besides me is interested in our traffic stats? Hmmm.

The folks at Slice of Lime have been working with us for a while now to develop a “How it Works” illustration for the Genlighten homepage. This is what they’ve created. We really like it. Look for it to be added to the site soon.

Just by way of comparison, here’s an earlier draft that we ultimately decided not to go with. What’s your opinion? Did we make the right choice? Why or why not?

I haven’t felt the need to do any genealogy gadget reviews on this blog up until now. Dick Eastman’s got that area pretty well covered, I’d say. But I do feel compelled to share a brief review of Novatel’s MiFi 2200 broadband wireless modem/router.

Web Access on the Go — How I’ve Done it So Far

Besides hotel accomodations and plane fare, one of my biggest expenses as an exhibitor at genealogy conferences has been the cost of Internet connectivity while I travel. Though some conference venues thankfully provide free wireless, many others charge $75-$100 per day for access to the web. Since my main reason for attending these shows is to demonstrate a working website, I’m stuck paying these fees.

For about the last year, I’ve used a broadband wireless card from Verizon to let my personal laptop connect to the web when I’m traveling. That way whether I’m waiting at an airport gate or manning the Genlighten booth, I’ve been able to retrieve email, browse RSS feeds, or make changes to the Genlighten site as needed for a single monthly fee (about $60 plus taxes.) But since my card only works with one laptop at a time, the computer I’ve used to demonstrate Genlighten to booth visitors has needed its own separate web connection, forcing me to pay the extra fees mentioned above. With luck, it looks like I won’t have to pay them any longer.

An Attractive New Solution

I first heard about the Novatel MiFi 2200 about a month ago from David Pogue of the NYT, in his article “Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed“. The article claimed that the device acted as a “personal Wi-Fi bubble” — compact and battery-powered — for up to five nearby PCs.  When Pogue mentioned that it would work particularly well for “trade show booth teams” I was sold.

I would have happily bought one that very second, but as it turned out I had to wait a few weeks for them to become available. Mine arrived yesterday. It cost me $149.99, or $100 after — you guessed it — a $50 mail-in rebate.

The Set-Up Process

Setup was a bit more involved than I would have liked. To begin with, I had to charge the battery for 2.5 hours. Then I plugged the unit, which is about the size of a 8 credit cards stacked together, into my notebook via a provided USB cable.  Verizon’s access management software promptly auto-installed and began configuring the device to work with my machine.

A few minutes later configuration seemed complete. My laptop’s internal wi-fi quickly recognized the MiFi 2200 and let me connect to it. Unfortunately, bringing up Firefox did not produce my usual iGoogle homepage. A call to Verizon Customer Service made it obvious why — I still needed to activate the device and associate it with my existing account. The manual gave the impression that the software would prompt me to do this via the web — so that aspect of the process seemed to fail. Nonetheless, the knowledgeable customer service rep soon had me up and running.

Speed and Strength Comparison

So far I’ve tested the MiFi 2200 under normal usage conditions here at “Genlighten World HQ” — i.e, in my daughter’s former bedroom that acts as our office. This has involved retrieving email, paging rapidly through RSS feeds using the “j” and “k” keys, switching between multiple tabbed windows in Firefox, and perhaps viewing the occasional brief video clip. At first, web pages loaded much slower than they do for my home Comcast connection. But that turned out to be related to signal strength rather than capacity.

Because the MiFi device doesn’t need to be plugged into my laptop, I’m free to locate it where cellular reception is better — like by a window. Doing that immediately got me four bars of reception and much more competitive download speeds. I haven’t measured it with any benchmark utilities, but I’d say it’s probably about one half the speed of my Comcast connection — pretty much in line with Verizon’s claim of 0.6 - 1.4 Mb/s. That should be good enough for airports, trade shows and the like, but not so fast that I’m tempted to ditch Comcast just yet.

But Will it Work at Genealogy Conferences?

Will the MiFi completely eliminate the need to pay for exhibit hall Internet access? I’ll find out this coming weekend, at the Family History Expo in Loveland, Colorado.

As I write this, I’ve got four laptops (mine, my wife’s, the Genlighten exhibit booth machine and my son’s MacBook Pro) all connected to the web over a single cellular connection. And I’m watching a streaming video, with only the usual minor glitches. So I’m cautiously optimistic that things will work well in Colorado.

I’m planning to blog from the booth during the Expo, so I’ll write a follow-up post to let you know how well the MiFi performs under enterprise-level conditions. Wireless internet at the Expo costs $45/day for a 0.5 Mb/s connection. That’s actually pretty reasonable, but if the MiFi let’s me forego those charges, I’ll have nearly paid for the cost of the device in a single weekend. That would be sweet indeed!

After a week off this coming weekend, it’ll be time to head off to another genealogy conference the following weekend, June 12th-13th. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to recruit lookup providers from Colorado for almost a year, and now I’ll get my chance.

At Holly Hansen’s invitation, I’ll be trying to share my impressions of the conference in this blog and via Twitter.

I don’t often get away from the Genlighten booth to attend many presentations during conferences like this one, and I’ve only rarely attended any evening conference events, but I’m making an exception this time. I’m very much looking forward to attending Jean Hibben’s banquet presentation. I met Jean at the Mesa FHExpo back in November, and I was highly impressed with her combined background in genealogy, history and folklore. Looks like she and “Uncle Butch” will be providing musical entertainment as well!

Presentations I’m Working On

I’ll be giving the Footnote for FHC Consultants talk I gave back at the Mesa FHExpo last November, updated to discuss the records Footnote has added since then along with their new “I Remember” pages.

I also plan to present an Introduction to Twitter for Genealogists. This will be a completely overhauled version of the talk I gave at the South Davis Family History Fair back in March of this year. Twitter is no longer the obscure geek-oriented service it was then. Oprah and other celebrities have embraced it and the mainstream media has coronated it as the next big shiny thing. If you’ve found Twitter helpful in furthering your genealogy research, please let me know in the comments to this post.

As we get closer to letting a few potential early adopters preview Genlighten in private beta form, we’re taking a few tentative steps towards establishing some new social media outposts on the web in addition to this blog.

Up until now, I’ve shifted back and forth here between sharing personal anecdotes and talking about Genlighten milestones and strategy. I’ve done the same with my Twitter account, casually mixing the personal with the corporate. As we start to approach the point where Genlighten becomes an authentic business rather than merely an extremely expensive side-project, it feels like it’s time to give the corporate entity and the CEO their own respective social media channels.

Genlighten — the Corporate Web Presence

What’s that mean going forward? For one thing, Genlighten now has its own Twitter account: @genlighten. There aren’t many updates there yet, but eventually that’ll be the account for our users to follow if they want updates on new features, scheduled maintenance, unscheduled downtime, special events, etc..

The Genlighten blog will remain our formal corporate communication channel — the place to hear what we’re up to, how we view the genealogy marketplace, and what we think we can offer that’s unique. But in keeping with the typical guidelines for a corporate site, I’ll probably inject my personal life here a bit less than I’ve done in the past.

We also now have a Genlighten fan page on Facebook: try this link, or just type “genlighten.com” into Facebook’s search box.

A YouTube channel (for Genlighten how-to and help videos) and a Slideshare.net account (for presentations) are still in the planning phases.

Me as CEO and Co-Founder

Because I want to continue to communicate in an informal way with the Genlighten community as well as with friends, family and colleagues, I’m now maintaining a personal blog at nicelittleniche.com. Since Genlighten, family history research, and the entrepreneurial worldview are such a huge part of my life at the moment, you can expect my nicelittleniche posts to focus on those three areas. But you’ll also get the occasional update on my family or the fun things we have going on when we’re not Genlightening.

In case you’re wondering, the title for the personal blog was inspired by a visitor to our booth at a Genealogy Conference last year, who, when she heard what we were up to, said without the slightest hint of condescension: “Oh… that’s a nice little niche.” [grin]

I’ll continue to share 140-characters-or-less views of my day-to-day experiences via my personal Twitter account, @hikari17.

And if you just can’t get enough of us…

…You can also follow my account on FriendFeed here. That way you’ll get both the personal and the corporate perspective in one place.

Thanks!

The three most important things for a successful retail establishment? Or  for selling real estate? That’s right:

1. Location
2. Location
3. Location

Over the past year and a half, I’ve staffed the Genlighten exhibit booth at more than 20 genealogy conferences in the US, Canada, and Europe. It turns out that (surprise!) location matters for a genealogy vendor just like it does for other businesses.

We’ve seen the most traffic when our booth has been:

• close to the entrance to the exhibit area
• within a few steps of the conference workshop classrooms
• next to the booth of a well-established vendor such as Footnote or  Moorshead Publishing
• in a place where tired conference-goers tend to congregate, such as near a snack bar or seating area.

At NGS in Raleigh, we were close to the exhibit area entrance AND right across from the FamilySearch folks. At the SCGS Jamboree last year, we were close to an entrance and right next to the Geni.com booth. At some smaller state or county-level conferences, we’ve sometimes had our booth in the same room that the presenters were speaking. The results have been excellent in all these cases.

But things haven’t always worked out well for us. At this year’s Ontario Genealogical Society conference, we’re in a particularly remote spot. Vendors here are divided up into two separate locations, both positioned far from the conference classrooms. To get to either area, attendees have to follow a serpentine path through the hallways of the Sheridan College student center. The organizers have put up lots of helpful signs, but I still see lots of people with lost looks on their faces asking for directions.

What’s’ more, we’re in the far back corner of a nightclub-like venue, to the side of the stage where visiting bands perform for the students here when school’s in session. When I first noticed this on the conference website, I consoled myself by noting that our table would be right next to the ladies’ restroom, which struck me as a potential high-traffic area. Unfortunately, however, the door to the restroom is labeled — get this! — “Dirty Girl”. As you can imagine, it hasn’t been well-patronized!

On the bright side, the exhibit areas and the dorm-style residence areas have free wireless access, and there’s been complimentary breakfast each morning as well. Visitors who have managed to find our booth have been friendly and positive, as always. And Ontario Genealogical Society volunteers have gone out of their way to accommodate us.

The next conference we’ll be attending is the Colorado Family History Expo. Look for us at Booth 305 (near the entrance, and next door to Generation Maps.)

I’m a little late on the Memorial Day “blog about your ancestor who served in the military” meme. But my wife happened to search Google Books this morning for my 4th great-Grandfather Benjamin Swetland, and she came across a nice find. The Connecticut DAR published a book entitled “Chapter Sketches: Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution; Patriots’ Daughters” in 1904.

Beginning on page 250, there’s an article highlighting Benjamin Swetland’s life and military career. Among some of the highlights:

• Benjamin served as a fife major in the Third Massachusetts Regiment during the revolutionary war
• He claims to have been an “Eye Witness” to “the Surrender of Gen. Burgoin at Saratoga in the year 1777″
• He copied a tune for the fife entitled “God Save The Congress” — a patriotic version of “God Save the King” into his roster book.
• He later composed “A New Song”, which implored the government to “shake off your slothfulness” and give the “brave boys” the support they needed.
• A musket he carried during the war and warming pan belonging to him were in the possession of a Mrs. William G. Mayer of Waterville, NY as of 1904.
• Benjamin’s Roster Book, from which some of the images in this post originated, was evidently presented to the Chicago Historical Society at some point.

We’d encountered a number of sources discussing Benjamin and his descendants before, but this one provided details we’d not been aware of previously. Sounds like a visit to the Chicago Historical Society should be on our agenda soon!

Bibliographic details from Google Books:

Chapter Sketches: Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution; Patriots' Daughters
By Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution,  Mary Philotheta Root,  Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution
Published by Connecticut chapters, Daughters of the American revolution, 1904
Original from the New York Public Library
Digitized Feb 26, 2008
390 pages