From the Roundtable: Gatherings in 2025
It's often said that family history is a collaborative sport, here at MissionGenealogy it's clear that something is happening when we get together. To make it sustainable, we're making changes...
If you’ve joined us for our
Roundtable or Office Hours gatherings, you’ll know just how magical they’ve become. We’re learning from and inspiring each other.Pacific & Atlantic Gatherings
The challenge is to make this work across an 18-hour time window across the planet. Members attended our last Roundtable gathering from as far away as Sweden and Western Australia. Yikes. Since our sessions have all been at 10 AM in California, it’s been difficult for everyone to join us.
and I came up with a way to make this work just a little better. Starting in January, we’ll consolidate our separate 60-minute Roundtable and Office Hour sessions into two 90-minute sessions each month, each designed for time windows optimized for opposite sides of the globe.If you’re familiar with my Projectkin Community Forum events, you’ll know I use these time windows all the time. You’ll notice in my calculations that some time windows are better for each region. Anyone can come to any session they want, this just about making sure that we aren’t responsible for starving you of sleep! 🥱
See MissionGenealogy.org/events for details. Our calendar calculates local times for you. With our California-centric view, here’s how it works out:
🌍 Our Atlantic time window starts at 10 AM in California which is the early evening in Europe, afternoons in the Eastern side of the Americas and the mid-morning in the West. This is the wee hours of the morning in the Pacific.
🌏 Our Pacific time window starts at 4 PM in California which is the early evening in the East and afternoon in the West of the Americas; it will be noon or early morning across New Zealand, Australia, and East Asia. This starts at midnight GMT or BST and even later in Europe.
A few other changes
Rooms!
In case you missed this week’s Roundtable session, we implemented Zoom’s Rooms feature. Based on initial feedback, I’d say it was a hit. The simple idea is to use this precious time together to get to know each other and focus on topics we’re interested in. During Tuesday’s meeting, we talked about two topics selected based on the poll Robin circulated in her “preparing for” post:
“Writing about Family History”
“Collaborative Research/Trees”
As we returned to the main session and shared insights, it seemed a common challenge we all faced was in finding ways to engage our family in our research. Clearly this is a topic we’ll return to.
Chat in Gatherings
To ensure that the not-recorded conversations during our gatherings are shared with everyone in the community, we’ve decided to focus the chat threads in Substack’s Chat. You can see the thread from our meeting here. Watch this space for future meetings as well and remember, you can search them too.
Need Help? Offer Help.
Another topic that came up in our discussion was to come up with a way to leverage each other’s expertise in our research. As a way to centralize these requests for help, I’ve just opened a new chat thread that’s a little like those “Need a penny” jars at a cash register:
Next Gathering: Office Hours November 12
Through the balance of 2024, we’ll continue to hold the separate Office Hours and Roundtables sessions, both scheduled in the “Atlantic” time window. I don’t have a specific agenda yet for the November gathering but certainly we can anticipate going around the room to see what kinds of things everyone wants to learn more about — or what discoveries they’ve made about using Substack.
One topic I’m thinking about is Substack Live. This new Live Video feature with interactive chat functions is coming to everyone over time, though the details aren’t yet clear. Have suggestions on how we might use it? Drop me a note I’d love to hear it.
Tell your friends!
I think all of us taking the time to participate in the gatherings have a self-interest in seeing this budding community be successful. The more of us participating in conversations here, the richer the insights. Take a moment to tell your friends.
If you need help getting them onboard, invite them to the Office Hours session and/or drop an ask into the Need Help? Office Help Chat thread.
About us
Finally, since many of you are new to
as subscribers or someone’s just forwarded this to you, a little about us. and I each have our own Substacks. We came together to help build the community of genealogy enthusiasts we wanted around us here on Substack. More about our mission here.