World of Webinars

The genealogical world is awash in webinars!

As you will see to the right of this post, I have joined the fray as well. I have an upcoming presentation for the 2020 Conference of the Virtual Genealogical Association in November. I gave a talk to the VGA membership last year, but unfortunately, I missed their deadline to offer talks for 2021.

I have two recorded presentations with Legacy Family Tree Webinars and have proposed other offerings for next year. LFTW have been going for 10 years now and have 1,365 presentations in their library, 333 of them free to view. They are organized in over 20 categories. New talks are added every month to LFTW.

I have two talks in the Family Tree (UK) video library. There are 47 individual recordings available to the magazine’s subscribers, again with more being added frequently. Many of the presentations were supposed to have been given live at a conference to be held last spring in London, England, but Covid-19 put a stop to that event.

I will also be recording one of my favourites for the Family History Down Under conference in March 2021.

Many, if not most family history societies and national genealogical organizations have reverted to virtual presentations due to lockdowns imposed by, again, limitations on gatherings as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. There are way too many to list here.

RootsTech will go all online in 2021, and free, with their RootsTech Connect conference.  The Family History Federation is organizing an event in November call the FHF Really Useful Family History Show. This one is very inexpensive.

There are continuing lists of webinars, seminars, podcasts, conferences and other online family history gatherings available at Conference Keepers (also organized by country), Cyndi’s List, Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.

Commercial and other data providers now have online educational opportunities on their webpages, Facebook pages or YouTube: MyHeritage, Ancestry, FindMyPast, TheGenealogist, FamilySearch.

Don’t forget libraries, archives and museums for live and recorded events: The National Archives (UK), National Archives (US), Library and Archives Canada.

Having access to all these online presentations is not a bad thing although the biggest problems are finding the time and choosing which ones to watch. The best way to find out what talks are upcoming and what be of interest or value is to subscribe to various email lists and newslettersn from societies (local and national), genealogical news providers, online summary keepers, commercial database providers, blogs, etc., including all of the ones I commented on above.

And I have not even mentioned the multitude of courses available online!