I spent the fourth week of January 2024 at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy virtual institute as the "Hive Minder" for Exploring Their Life/The Social History of Your Family. The week-long course was coordinated by Gena Philibert-Ortega,, who presented many of the sessions, but there were other speakers as well.
In the past, I have attended SLIG Institutes as a student. Acting as "Hive Minder" gives the course a different perspective. I was responsible for opening the room each morning, and reopening it after each break, admitting participants, starting and stopping the recording of the sessions (the most stressful responsibility for me), making speakers co-hosts enabling them to share their screens, taking attendance, and making announcements. I quickly learned who would be late for each session and who used a name different from that on my roster.
The course explored how using historical events; worldwide, national, and local, combined with letters, postcards, greeting cards, other ephemera, and family heirlooms, can be woven into the usual birth, marriage, and death information to create a much more interesting story for their descendants to read or video for them to watch.
Donna Cox Baker, a historian, genealogist, and author, presented an understandable and comprehensive program on the use of Zotero® to collect and organize genealogy and historical information (and lots of other things, as well) to retrieve it quickly and easily.
Jan Joyce, a genealogist with a background in academia, led an interactive session on conducting a Literature Review, a topic new to some of the students.
Annette Lyttle presented twice on more traditional genealogy topics. Her theme which was reflected in almost every presentation, was "always start with a research question". Maybe I have heard it enough times so that I will internalize it.
The most unusual presentation for a genealogy conference was that given by Dan Bouk, author of Democracy's Data The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them. It is a history of the 1940 census. The students who had read it highly recommended it. The New York Times listed it as one of the 100 notable books of 2022.
Tammy Hepps, the author of HomesteadHebrews.com, presented a captivating overview of her study of the Jewish residents of Homestead, Pennsylvania. She initially envisioned a one-year project--it has been ten years so far and the end is not in sight. It demonstrated the value of studying a neighborhood, its relationships, and migrations.
The final two sessions of the week featured presentations by the students of their work telling their families' stories using social history,. I learned about apples, quilts, a grand tour of Europe in 1931 using postcards, and viewed the pages of an eighteenth-century schoolboy's notebook which prepared him for his future career.
Being a "Hive Minder" was a learning experience and it may have been a service to the genealogy community. I appreciated the opportunity for an institute experience without the financial investment. However, the time commitment and lack of schedule flexibility are a serious consideration before applying to do it again.
Barbara Mattoon
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