I subscribe to the Weekly Genealogist, an email newsletter
published (as you might have guessed, on a weekly basis) by the New England
Historic and Genealogical Society (NEHGS).
It’s a great newsletter, with updates on NEHGS databases, webinars,
in-person seminars, collection acquisitions, etc. The newsletter also includes a mini newsfeed,
providing links to articles of interest from other sources, as well as blogs
and articles on various areas of interest to genealogists.
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| The NEHGS Library, Newbury Street, Boston |
It’s an informative and interesting read each week, but
there’s one aspect of the newsletter that I find most compelling: they include
a reader survey, with questions I always find of interest. The newsletter also provides the results from
the prior week poll and selected stories that were shared by subscribers that
relate to their own survey responses.
Inevitably, as summer approached, one such poll question was “[Do] you
plan to travel for genealogical purposes this summer” with multiple options for
answers, including visits to libraries/societies; visits to ancestral
towns/cities; attendance at a genealogical convention or seminar, etc.
This struck me because most summers I do travel to visit
relatives, ancestral locales and to institutions to conduct research. This summer I am still in the first year of a
new job, so the opportunity for taking time off is limited – plus, the summer
is our crunch time at work: I am traveling, but not for my own purposes!
Seeing this poll question did cause me to reflect, though,
on past travel that I’ve taken for genealogical reasons or even just to places
that played a role in my family’s history.
