2019 was a fabulous year for my business. I gave almost 20 talks, including 3 for Legacy Family Tree Webinars and a talk and a workshop at NERGC. Talks about the 1918 flu were the most common, but I gave almost every talk I have developed during my 10 year speaking career in 2019. I led a discussion group at the Massachusetts Historical Society about using recipes to explore medicinal theories and treatments in colonial New England. I made my TV debut on Ghost Nation where I was the 1918 flu expert. I went to the Professional Management Conference in Salt Lake City and met many of my colleagues.
I collected dozens of family stories about the impact of the 1918 flu pandemic and am in the process of sharing them on the website I developed.
I was active in the genealogy community, particularly the New England Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), where I served as chapter representative to the APG. I joined the APG Writers Special Interest Group (SIG) and am the vice-president of the SIG. I coordinated the popular NEAPG Table Topics luncheon at NERGC.
I also started thinking more about writing. I joined the APG Writers SIG as mentioned above, as well as formed a buddy check-in system with 2 different sets of people to keep me (and them) on track. I submitted 2 articles to genealogy journals. One was published in Crossroads and the other will be published later this year in another journal. I was invited to write another article about epidemics that will come out later this year.
Yet, for all this success, I did not progress much in researching my own family. Trying to prove (or disprove) my connection to James Chilton of the Mayflower has been on my to-do list for a long time. I know which generations I need to prove, and I pull out the list every once in a while, but it never goes anywhere. My Loyalist ancestor intrigues me to no end, and I have dozens of land records to go through for him and his son to try to figure out when they were in Canada and when they were in Vermont–they seem to have criss-crossed several times. In addition, I would love to write an accessible life story of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents for my nieces and nephews.
Nor did I do a good job of keeping my blogs up to date. This blog especially has been sorely neglected.
So, what does 2020 hold for me? Wait for the next blog post…
bridgingthepast.com 