Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy is over …. sigh
Leaving Salt Lake City after an incredible, intense, really fun week at SLIG – Salt Lake Institute for Genealogy. I took the course “Exploring Native American Research”. Learning about the records of the Native tribes of the United States was so interesting, varied and we learned at depth. We each received a different person to research, based on our personal request about learning about a particular tribe. I had a very interesting man, Edgar L. Powell, a Choctaw man who was a long-time Methodist minister in Indian Territory. Three marriages, five children (at least that I found) and frequently moving to serve congregations that asked him to come.
What was the best about the research on Edgar, and the Choctaw, was that the same or very similar records exist for my Lakota family. My Métis family in Québec have different records and some the same so I’ll look into some of that later, but in the meantime, while I was at the Family History Library, I took advantage of the time to also look into some of the Lakota records. Interesting, impactful and fun!
We had to write a short report on the person we researched, and we received some instructions from one of our instructors, Rick Fogarty (he was a great teacher!!), apparently none of us heard them!!! LOL! Rick said that we were all over-achievers because we went well beyond what he asked of us. Too funny ….. the challenge of working with, teaching a group of skilled researchers who are used to doing client work and having the professional passion to do anything we do with the same attention to detail that we give to our clients. LOL!
Rick and fellow teacher/researcher/mom Billie Fogarty gave us SO much to think about! Sharing about record groups, examples of ways to analyze the records, information about the kinds of records that were created for the various ways that the government and tribe would document the people. We heard from Paula Stuart Warren about her many years of research and work in the Native/tribal research area (she had been one of my first teachers at lectures I attended back in the 1990s!), sharing many examples from a wide variety of tribes including her experiences working with tribal enrollment offices.
Last night was the final banquet with awards, door prizes (wish I would have won!), and a really great keynote by Dr. Tom Jones, one of the early teachers that I learned from back in the 1990s. I had the privilege of learning from him at my first institute last summer – GRIP: Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh. I took at documentation/citations course from him to improve my ability to cite my research.
All in all, it was both overwhelming, exciting, hard, challenging and engaging. We had the “challenge” of a really cold room so we all were drinking hot beverages, wearing layers. The hotel eventually figured it out and the room finally was better on Thursday and Friday. I was so impressed with SLIG! I really want to attend again – not sure about next year, although there are always DNA courses so that may be what I sign up for. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from such high-quality, nationally-recognized speakers. Such a memorable week!! The work of Lineage Journeys, the content that I provide to my clients will be better thanks to these great instructors – Rick and Billie Fogarty, Paula Stuart-Warren, Melissa Johnson, and Paul Graham! In the Lakota language, wopila – thank you.
Lineage Journeys 