This weekend I am teaching two classes at our local family history fair. One is on the census and one is on the partner sites that work with familysearch.org. I have spent about 20 hours preparing the census class. Most of that time was finding examples from my family and friends' families to use as examples in my class. Teaching a class requires sacrifice and that sacrifice does not go unrewarded. I always find new things on my own family as I "practice what I preach" and test out the things that I am going to teach on my own family lines. Most of those 20 hours were spent following leads to new avenues of research while I was gathering examples and making screenshots for the presentation. Then I would remember that I was supposed to be preparing the class and not researching my own family and get back on track.
I had not done much preparation for the familysearch.org partners class until last night. I spent quite a bit of time looking for good examples of things that you can find on the ancestry.com, findmypast, and MyHeritage websites. I was not feeling too excited about any of my examples, though, so today during my lunch break, I continued the search for the perfect example to teach about the resources available on findmypast. I know that they have a lot of great British records so I decided I should try one of my English ancestors to be the focus of the search. I randomly chose William Eagers born 1811 in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, England, son of Joshua Eagers (my fourth great grandfather). I don't know who Joshua Eagers' parents are, but that was not really the purpose of my search. I was just trying to find an example that I could show of an English record on findmypast.
The first result on the search list was for his christening record. I already knew his christening date from indexed records, but I was looking for an example, not doing research.
I'm doing the genealogy happy jig!
