Going to NGS in Fort Wayne | Wanna Ride Along? 👋 Meet us in the Expo Hall 🚙 💨
Our Projectkin Ride Along Partnership with Geneabloggers continues long after RootsTech. I get to enjoy the library, networking, and coursework of the annual conclave — in person! Wanna Ride Along?
The excitement is contagious!
As Projectkin, I’ll be attending this year’s American National Genealogical Society (NGS) Annual Conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a little over a week. Best of all, I get to do this with my bestie, Kyla Bayang, whom you probably know from RootSquadRoundup and now a Geneabloggers board member.
It’s the perfect opportunity for RideAlongPartners to ride again!
With the joy of the RideAlong at RootsTech still in mind, we were both all-in on making a RideAlong at NGS happen too, so we’re here to mingle and get the word out about all we’re doing to encourage family history storytelling.
Are you headed to NGS, too? Join us in a livestream!
Not satisfied to meet in person, Kyla and I have planned a livestream, and a photo opp too: Ride Along Partners, Again. And why not? It’ll be a fun way to connect with all of you online and bring our communities together in real life.
If everything works (and this is a big “if,” to be sure), Kyla and I will start the livestream from the Expo Hall on the first night of the conference during the welcome reception.
Fortunately, our old friend, Rick Voight, founder of Vivid-Pix, is a Platinum sponsor of the conference and a huge supporter of our mission as RideAlongPartners. He has generously offered our RideAlong duo a complimentary spot in their fabulously positioned sponsors’ booth in the Expo Hall. 🎉 Look for me there between conference sessions.
If you’re a Geneablogger or Projectkin member and at the conference, please pop by. If you’re there at the welcome reception, you can be in the livestream, too!
Look for the Blogger Beads and say hi!
With over eighteen years of supporting each other as genealogy bloggers, Geneabloggers are everywhere. Kyla and I are eager to spot Geneabloggers with those iconic Blogger Beads and joyful discoveries. Find each other during sessions, in the Expo Hall, and around the impressive ACPL stacks, as well as at fun trivia nights and lively pub gatherings. The conference creates a rare opportunity to speak with as many fellow-travelers in genealogy as possible, and I’m thrilled to be part of it.
A broader focus for RideAlongPartners.org
In anticipation of this NGS conference, I’ve safely archived our RootsTech RideAlongPartners videos and updated the website to reference the booth banner with “Discover, Collaborate, Preserve” and the core of our shared message with the simple flow of a reporter’s story structure: what, who, when, why, and ending with where…:1
If you haven’t already, join us as Projectkin, Geneabloggers, or both, and be part of the crew inspiring others to share their stories. Learn more and join our email lists:
A complex weave of goals
For me, this trip is a complex weave of personal and professional goals. Professionally, I’d already planned to attend as a way to dip my toe in the real world. The conference will be my first in-person event since RootsTech 2020. 🫣 As I tune up my small talk for the real world, I’m looking forward to mingling with the accomplished amateurs and professional genealogists at the conference. We’re all looking for new ways to reach and inspire the genealogy-curious.
As Projectkin, I am particularly looking forward to meeting representatives from local historical and genealogical organizations. With programs like our Stories250, Speakers’ Corner, and All About That Place, I see the potential for a range of new outreach initiatives. Maybe even a few of my hare-brained schemes, too.
The journey to Indiana
As I shared in my recent post, a journey to Indiana has a personal twist for me. The Ride Along at RootsTech gave me the courage to throw myself into Relatives at RootsTech. The connection of databases between RootsTech attendees and the FamilySearch tree app helped me discover cousins in the Fort Wayne area, something I talked about in this post:
If they were here, why? That led me to an unexpected “Friends and Neighbors” connection to my paternal 2x great-grandmother’s family. Silly me, I’d not paid enough attention to the women in the family. Now the trip has a personal connection, and I look forward to visiting some of those Martz, Gehring, Kunderd, and Ries family ancestors on the Lindenwood Cemetery tour.
I was already excited about a visit to the revered Allen County Public Library (ACPL) Genealogy Center. I’ve been eager to explore their collection for years to discover details about my mother’s family. Among them are at least eight Quaker families who migrated from North Carolina and Ohio to Indiana in the early 19th century. Among them are the Parker, Jaques, Newby, Sering, Patten, Coffin, Milne, and Hardy families who settled in Henry, Boone, and Franklin counties in Indiana. I shared some of these details in one of my early posts about my family on this platform under the “My Sixteen” banner.
I am eager to explore their Quaker records to validate whether my 2nd great-grandfather, Isaac Parker, was in the first matriculating class at Richmond School before it became Earlham College, as is reported in family documents. I have started compiling a list of books and articles from the ACPL collection and their wonderous PERSI to explore during those special late-night hours.
How about you? Will you be there? Have related research? Happy to do what I can!
“How” seemed a little bit of a stretch, but I figured the context was clear with “who, what, when, where, and why.”
Looking forward to seeing what you find, cousin! Say hi to Johannes and Anna Maria for me…