Monthly Archives: February 2012

Writing for a Society Publication

English: N.E. Historic-Genealogical Society, S...

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I write for the Seattle Genealogical Society’s Bulletin and it is an experience in learning how to put together a great article on family history. Having learned the ropes of how to research family trees and how to look up records in various sources, I’m able to put all of that data together in a comprehensive article to share with the community.

Many societies need new material for their newsletters and journals on a regular basis. Local, county, and state genealogical societies often have at least a newsletter. Some have journals of varying publication schedules: quarterly, semi-annual, and/or annual. Lineage societies such as the Mayflower Descendants also have journals and publications you can write for.

Journals other than those of the national societies such as the National Genealogical Society’s Quarterly and the NEHGS Register often have broader standards for article submissions. While the Quarterly and Register articles often are written by professionals and peer-reviewed, many society journals have somewhat lowered standards for quality and source citations.

There are a number of considerations for writing for a society publication, such as their focus on a particular area, time period, or subject matter. Societies also have their own guidelines and styles of presentation.

Focus Areas

Finding a genealogical society or journal for a topic area is easy. One of the best ways to find an appropriate journal is to ask a reference librarian at your local library. The genealogy librarian is often familiar with the different journals and their focus areas and able to tell you which ones for which you might consider submitting an article.

A newsletter is often more appropriate for general articles. For a focused article, such as a compiled family tree, or ancestry genealogy, you might consider submitting it to a journal, rather than to a newsletter.

Speak with the society before you submit an article to query the editor for its appropriateness to their journal or newsletter. If it is, they are likely to accept and publish it. The article then becomes the property of the society, restricting your ability to re-publish or submit it to another society. If, on the other hand, a society doesn’t accept an article, you are free to submit it to another. Always follow up, within a month or two of submission to see whether the society has plans for the article.

Guidelines and Styles

Be sure to check for guidelines and style guides on the society’s website or contact them and ask if they have any idiosyncrasies. For instance, the Seattle Genealogical Society’s Bulletin uses the word “county” in its text and end-notes on its first occurrence. As an example: “Seattle, King County, Washington Territory.” After that, they just use the city or county name, as appropriate.

Benefits

The benefits of having written an article for a society newsletter or journal are three-fold. You benefit the communities of society members, people interested in the topic area, and genealogists or family historians who read the publication.

NPM

© 2012 N. P. Maling — Sea Genes – Family History & Genealogy Research

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Sunday’s Obituary – Mrs. Jane Evans, Portland, Oregon

Mrs. Jane Evans

Final rites for Mrs. Jane Evans, 90, resident of Portland for the past 62 years, will be held at 3 P. M. today in Pearson’s Funeral church. Death, which occurred Thursday, was due to chronic myocarditis.

She was born in England and came to this country in 1872. She was a charter member of the Third Baptist church.

A daughter and two sons survive. They are Mrs. Alice Myers, Fred J. and Norman D. Evans. Eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren also survive. Interment will be in Riverview cemetery.

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Portland Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 23 March 1940, page 8, column 2.

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TMG 8 Review

I guess I’d better say a few words about Wholly Genes’ The Master Genealogist, version 8, now. It has been a while since I wrote about the public beta release, so here are a few words about the final [sic] release.

Since Wholly Genes released their still-buggy TMG Version 8 in December, things have gotten a lot more interesting on the home front. I am still occupied with cleaning up and fixing the output from Version 7 documents, so have not really tried the new features other than to compare them to the old.

The major change for me was the Windows 7 printing capability. It works, to a degree. I cannot open a MS Word-format document in OpenOffice.org Writer without crashing it. Instead, I have to use RTF (Rich Text Format) output. There is not a whole lot of difference between the output required, and RTF is more common than Word 97, so it is satisfactory.

One other thing that particularly irks me about the reports is the changes Wholly Genes made to the Journal report. Although it is adequate to the format, the output needs extensive fixes to conform to either the NEHGS or the NGSQ Register style. In particular, I am not very happy with the forced use of “ibid” in footnotes. This problem does not occur with endnotes, which are “uniqued” for the style now. Yuck! Even more reason to write your own reports with data extracted in raw form from TMG.

I am still particularly interested in the GEDCOM import/export issues with TMG versions 7 and 8. They both continue to have numerous flaws. I tried the export in TMG 8 with the option for all tags and not all tags were exported. This is a serious flaw, especially for someone who might not examine the output before sending it off to a correspondent.

I need to export a number of major projects for backup and further processing in other applications, and this is impossible to do. To quote from my review of the public beta: “TMG’s deliberately removing a researcher’s work from public sharing or even for private backup is a grievous mistake that could have legal and ethical consequences …”.

Again, as I wrote in the public beta review “the rest of the changes are minor and more appropriate for a minor number release, say 7.5.” Tamura Jones also wrote a review of the beta version. His review is an excellent portrayal of the rest of TMG’s faults, and any potential user should read it.

While it is nice to use TMG 8 on a Windows 7 machine, I will be sticking with TMG 7 on Windows XP in a virtual machine for a while. I will use version 7 until Wholly Genes fixes a bunch more bugs and gets version 8 stable enough for full release status. Finally, by the time 2015 rolls around (the year Microsoft ends support for the TMG database backend), I’ll probably have my own genealogy application up and running with a full data set extracted from TMG, in complete form. So, until then, we’ll keep struggling with the best and worst of the genealogy applications on the market: The Master Genealogist.

NPM

© 2012 N. P. Maling — Sea Genes – Family History & Genealogy Research

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On Indexing

I am currently preparing an index for a family history. The index will include places as well as people. A town, county, and state name index is important to family histories. The reason for including place names in the index is to allow the reader to follow a larger family group on its migrations to various places.

In another family history, covering colonial and federal period Massachusetts, the family consistently expanded outwards to New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and New York, making the project that much larger. By including these items in the index, the reader can follow a particular branch of the family in its outward peregrinations.

Sometimes, if the family history is large enough, or complex enough, separate indexes might work better to allow for quick finding in the text. You might want to consider having the primary family in its own index, everyone else related to the primary family in a general index, and place names in a third, or subject index.

A subject index in a family history would include topics such as farming, occupations, the names of prominent universities the family members have graduated from, and other such matters. One of my current indexing projects includes references to about a dozen universities and several dozen more graduates of those universities. As is a major feature of the family history, it is imperative that they be indexed; perhaps names of graduates under the university heading, or perhaps just the universities referenced where they occur in the text. It is a judgment call whether to index the graduates and universities together.

The level of detail in a surname index can be important, especially with larger family histories. People oftentimes name their sons and daughters after other members of the family. For instance, a son would be named after one of his grandfathers. This pattern can continue for generations. In the index, one would ideally include the birth and death years, as well as at least the middle initial, if not the full middle name, of each member of the family with the same given name.

NPM

© 2012 N. P. Maling — Sea Genes – Family History & Genealogy Research

This post originally appeared on the defunct Seattle Book Scouts’ Blog in 2009.

Sunday’s Obituary – Andrew M. Miller, Portland Oregon

Andrew M. Miller

Funeral services for Andrew Mortimer Miller, 62, retired contractor, and one-time resident of Portland, who died at his home in Tacoma Thursday, will be held at the Lynn mortuary in Tacoma today at 3 P. M.

Born in Davenport, Ia., Mr. Miller came to Portland with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Miller, about 40 years ago and moved to Tacoma in 1915.

He is survived by the widow, Blanche, four sisters, Mrs. Clarice Bruhn of Portland, Mrs. Esther Packard of Port Townsend, Wash., Mrs. Harrison Mason of San Diego and Mrs. Lee Abbott of Seattle, and a brother, Herbert R. Miller of New York.

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Portland Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 23 March 1940, page 8, column 2.

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 Portland Oregonian, 23 March 1940, p. 8, c. 2.

Portland Oregonian, 23 March 1940, p. 8, c. 2.