Availability on my lecture and travel calendar is on a very limited basis only.
Thank you very much for your interest and your thoughtful invitations.

More topics can be created upon request, with advance notice.
The topics above can also be customized to fit the needs or the theme of your seminar.

• Googling for Grandma
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. Everyone loves Google, the most popular search engine online. Now learn all the secrets and tricks, hidden within this tool and find out how to optimize them for genealogical research.

• Enumerating the U.S. Census Online
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. The U.S. Federal Census is an important set of records that we must all use to track our ancestors in the United States. The Internet has a variety of sources available for genealogists to help them use the census, including commercial databases, volunteer transcriptions, and numerous tutorials. What is the difference between all the offerings online? How do you best use these online tools to maximize the benefits without duplicating your efforts on different Web sites? This lecture will answer those questions and also demonstrate online databases and the software interfaces needed to view scanned images of the census online.

• How to Cite Your Internet Sources
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. Source citation is a necessity to support quality genealogical research. We will discuss the necessity for citing your data sources, followed by a demonstration of creating citations for a variety of Internet sources.

• Evaluating Web Sites
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. Wonderful! You found information on the Internet regarding your 2nd-great grandparents. Now ask yourself these questions: Where did this information come from? Who made this information available to me online? Is this information freely available for me to use in my own research files or publications? How can I know that the details are reliable and the sources are accurate? This topic will illustrate how to explore a web site in order to find the answers to these questions and more.

• The Great URL Hunt
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. URLs (web addresses) are one of the big mysteries of the Internet. Domain names, directory structures, file names, file types and broken links can all create confusion and roadblocks for the average web surfer. We will discuss how to read a URL and how to locate URLs within a web site during a visit. We will walk through the creation of a new URL and demonstrate how to track down new addresses for broken links.

• A Guided Tour of Cyndi's List
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. This begins with a brief history of Cyndi's List, followed by an overview of how to navigate the site and how to tell when the site is updated. Learn how to effectively use this valuable resource tool to as your jumping-off point onto the Internet.

• Organizing PC Files
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. Files here, programs there, lost bits and bytes everywhere. Are you tired of searching your computer fruitlessly? Frustrated when you can’t find the notes you created in your word processor? Learn how to set up a foolproof filing system and an electronic workbook to correspond with your offline research.

• Planting Your Family Tree Online
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. We won't discuss the technical methods of creating a personal home page for genealogy, but instead will focus on what things you should be sure to include on your home page to make it a helpful research tool. Learn how having a home page of your own will enhance your research, as well as what things to avoid and how to attract visitors to your web site in order to reach that distant cousin out there in genealogical cyberspace.

• The Internet Communications Depot
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. On the Internet, genealogists come and they go. They leave trails of breadcrumbs behind them in the form of queries, surname postings, and Web site announcements in every nook and cranny. But are they using the various Internet communications tools to the fullest potential? And do they remember which mailing lists, message boards and Web sites they used when they posted their messages? We will discuss each of these tools and methods for using them properly and effectively.

• The Ups and Downs of Uploading and Downloading
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. Do zip files and e-mail attachments give you fits? Does FTP sound like some brand of motor oil? Do you know where your downloaded files have ended up in the mysterious caverns deep within your computer's hard drive? Now that you have them, what do you do with them? We'll take the mystery out of file transfers online and give tips and shortcuts you can use to make this part of your online research a breeze.

• E-mail: How to Communicate Easily and Effectively with the World
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. The discussion covers many aspects of using e-mail, including: how to write effective e-mail to aid in your research, how to use features in your e-mail software program to organize your time spent online and how to make the most of this terrific, yet many times, under-utilized research tool.

• Researching with Friends, Cousins and Experts on Genealogy Mailing Lists
  --Available for a 1-hour presentation. The discussion covers the use of thousands of e-mail mailing lists available for genealogical research. Learn how to subscribe to mailing lists, how to manage your subscription, how to participate in mailing lists and how to maximize the benefits that mailing lists have to offer.

• The World Wide Web - Quit Surfing and Start Researching
  --Available for a 1-hour overview or a more in-depth 2-hour presentation. The discussion covers using the World Wide Web as an aid in your research. Learn tips and tricks for making the web browser work for you. We'll cover effective, methodical research as opposed to random surfing. Examples of searchable databases will be shown, along with hints on having successful searches.

• Question and Answer Session
  --Available for a 1-hour session. We invite the seminar attendees to ask questions about any aspect of using the Internet for their genealogical research. I recommend a Q&A session at the end of any all day seminar to give people a chance to clarify anything that they learned during the other sessions presented that day.