My Genea-Mecca Sojourn is Coming to an End

After six weeks in Salt Lake City, I'll be leaving Sunday morning. It has been a satisfying and frustrating experience. Although no breakthroughs have been made, more documents have been gathered that add to the understanding of some of the ancestors. Of course, some of those documents have generated more questions - a few which will likely never be answered. But that is the nature of genealogy and family history research, which is a seemingly never-ending obsession.



In addition to research at the library, I've also been working on cleaning up my Legacy database. It is a slow and tedious process but I'm starting to have a good feeling about it. There is still a lot to be done with it but there is light at the end of the tunnel. One of the benefits of this process is that some of the "holes" in my research have been identified and I was able to obtain a few of those missing documents here in Salt Lake City.



One of the highlights of my visit here was being able to spend some time with Denise Levenick, The Family Curator. Denise was here for five days, coming a few days prior to the Utah Genealogical Association's Spring Conference where she was the keynote speaker and gave several presentations. It was a very nice change of pace to have someone to bounce ideas off of and just talk about stuff.





One evening, A.C. Ivory joined us for dinner at The Garden restaurant on the 10th floor of the Joseph Smith Building. Lots of laughing and talking - and we also enjoyed the sunset over the valley!







What's up next?



The coast of California will be my next stop, for about a week of "just relaxing" then I'll be meeting up with some of my Joslin cousins in Missouri in mid-May. After that, I'll be returning to Indiana to "settle down" into a somewhat "normal" life - whatever that is!



G.R.I.P. is on the agenda in July. I'll be attending "Your Immigrant Ancestors’ Stories: Writing a Quality Narrative" with John Philip Colletta and Michael Hait and in August I'll be going to the FGS Conference in Fort Wayne. I'm looking forward to seeing some of genea-peeps again and soaking in some knowledge that will, hopefully, help with the research process.