52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy: Week 11 Webinars

This is week 11 of Amy Coffin’s Abundant Genealogy series.

Technology:  Technology makes it possible for genealogy classroom learning to come to you.  Webinars are now hosted by many instructors on a variety of family history subjects.  Share with us a webinar or series of webinars that you appreciate.

Most recently I have been interested in learning more about my Irish ancestors.  My research centers on my great-grandmother Mary Theresa Sheehan Killeen Walsh who emigrated supposedly from County Cork in 1886.  Since there is no 1890 federal census to go by, my few clues to her life are from the 1900 Bronx, New York Census and family lore.  Her arrival preceded Ellis Island, so that’s not a resource.

I’m curious about her life in Ireland.  Who exactly were her parents and siblings?  Where did they live?  What did they do for a living?  What prompted her to come to America?  Did her parents come too?  Who were THEIR parents?  Where do I start when I have so little to go on?

Two places I go for free webinars are Ancestry and Legacy Family Tree.  Both have a webinar on how to do research on Irish ancestors.  Ancestry’s webinars are all grouped under the main tab “Learning Center.”   When you go to Ancestry and click on the Learning Center tab, it’ll look like this:

But beware -  some of the webinars have been mislabeled.  I clicked on “Irish Ancestors” but got the tutorial on how to share family stories using MyCanvas.  Hmm.  So then I clicked on “Using MyCanvas …” and actually got the webinar on conducting research on Irish ancestors.  These webinars are several years old, so I wonder why no one has reported the confusion or why Ancestry hasn’t fixed it. 

While the information is just as good as the information provided over at Legacy, the visual and audio quality of Ancestry’s webinar is poor.  The slides appear a bit fuzzy and the sound is echo-y. 

Legacy’s webinars can be found under the “Training” tab.  It looks like this:  

It seems most of the webinars are offered free and for a set length of time after the live presentation.  Then the webinars can be purchased on CD, but you can preview them free for about 15 minutes. 

I have gotten a lot of good information from several of the Legacy webinars.  The pace is always good; slides are clear and useful.  The speakers have been easy to listen to, well-prepared, and friendly.  Even though I’m one of 1000s attending a virtual class, I always feel like the speaker is in the room with ME. 

I am not a customer of Legacy, but I like what I see. 

©2014, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.