November Office Hours: Posts, Notes, Chat and more

Note: In building the Mission: Genealogy community,

Robin Stewart

of

Genealogy Matters

and I have made an effort to make sure that everyone is comfortable in our live program discussion sessions. These are less about presentations and more about nuts-and-bolts learning. Since it can be hard to ask questions with a camera pointed at you, we simply don’t record the discussion.¹

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below. If the topic requires a more lengthy demo, we may take it up as a brief recorded presentation at the beginning of the next program.

Tips & Tools:

• Our

  Mission: Genealogy

  event calendar

  • Now available at MissionGenealogy.org/events (this is a filtered view of the Projectkin event calendar which hosts the listing.)

• Gatherings: Office Hours Combining with Roundtables

  • Starting in January, our Roundtable and Office Hour events will be combined into 90-minute “Gatherings” timed for the convenience of the Atlantic and Pacific regions. (Yes, you can come to both if you’d like.)

    • The Pacific event, Jan 7/8

    • The Atlantic event, Jan 14/15

    You must register for each event to get a personal Zoom link. You can register for multiple events at once.

• MissionGenealogy & Social Media:

  • Many of us met each other or first heard about MissionGenealogy or even Substack on social media, at gatherings like #AncestryHour, #GenChat, and #OnePlaceWednesdays on X.Twitter.

    • These online gatherings are now failing on X (insert ownership and political views), but many have decamped to Bluesky, Mastodon, and, of course, Substack. To keep track, take a look at the new listing including platforms, hashtags, and times.

    • MissionGenealogy.org/connections

  • I see these as a compliment to our work at

    Mission: Genealogy
    , but look forward to that as a discussion topic. Should we consider convening a chat topic at an appointed time? What should it cover? Would that cannibalize other platform discussions?

In addition to a few follow-up questions about today’s presentation, our conversation also lingered on observations of how Substack's engagement features somewhat mirror the social behaviors we adopt as people.

We talked about how our feelings about receiving thank-you notes can be surprisingly passionate. They are important for more than just acknowledgment.

That left me thinking about just how much I appreciate these gatherings and all of you as members engaged when and where you can. Your encouragement makes my day — and your insights have improved my work for my own family. Thank you for all you do. 🥰

1. Also, for those of you who were there… you may notice this recording is just 22 minutes long but the live session was about 24. (I fixed those awkward 2 minutes fooling with my screen sharing in post-production. In video, you always get a do-over. 😉)