2015 Fall Dallas Genealogical Society Seminar

The Fall 2015 Dallas Genealogical Society (DGS) seminar on October 24 was great; Paul Lacopo was an entertaining speaker and covered a lot of material that was completely different from most of the sessions that I've attended at DGS, FGS and RootsTech.  Paul is a retired veteranian; one of his sessions was on how to read death certificates and the names used for various diseases over time.  Although talking about the infectious diseases of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries is not all that appealing, it is important to know and understand both from a genealogical perspective and a public health perspective.  We don't realize just how far we have come in a short period of time.

The session on social history and social history resources was also very useful for understanding alternative documents to standard birth/death/marraige public records for periods when these records were not kept.  He had a couple of fascinating case studies on using social history to untangle a messy duplicate name problem in the 1800s was a wonderful example of genealogy and of story telling.