Today's DAR
After a summer break, live genealogy lectures at the DAR Library are back! In a few weeks, on Tuesday, September 18 at 10 AM, I will give a talk about indirect evidence. The talk is titled “Indirect Evidence: Making the Case If You Do Not Have Direct Answers,” and I will be discussing the promise and potential pitfalls of indirect evidence. This talk will contain a number of examples, and is particularly aimed at new or intermediate researchers. Indirect evidence is evidence that does not answer the research question by itself, but needs to be combined with other evidence to make the case. (A highly simplified example might be a situation where there is no direct evidence to connect Sibling A to his or her parents, but there is evidence to connect him or her to Sibling B, who CAN be connected to the parents. With addition of other evidence, we can use this link between the siblings to prove the parentage of Sibling A.)
In October, we will continue with our theme of researching female ancestors with Clarissa Mulliken’s talk on finding wives and mothers on Saturday, October 20, at 10 AM.
November will see not one, but TWO highly topical lectures: 10 AM on Tuesday, November 6, Tom Ragusin will discuss the Continental Line, from the lowest recruit all the way to George Washington, and on Tuesday, November 20, Austin Spencer will talk about sources for New England research.
We will wrap the year up in style with Elizabeth Ernst’s talk on Saturday, December 1, at 10 AM, where she will talk about naming patterns, and their use in genealogy.
All presenters are librarians or genealogists at DAR. Library talks take place in the National Officers’ Club Assembly Room, and are free and open to the public.
Did you know DAR Library’s popular genealogy lecture series are archived on the web, so you can watch them at any time? Just go to www.dar.org/OnlineLectures to learn about connecting families from Rhode Island to Australia, Asian-American resources, ways to make better use of FamilySearch, researching Revolutionary women, and African-American research in Washington DC, just to mention the highlights of 2018. Lectures from previous years are also available.
In addition to the lectures, the Library is also conducting regularly scheduled free Library Orientation sessions. The next orientation dates are September 1, October 2, November 3, and December 4. All tours start in the Library at 10 AM.
Whether you can attend in person or watch the recordings online, we hope you find our DAR Library Genealogy Lecture series presentations to be a helpful resource!
