The CGL Needs Your Help–Research Kickstarter

Was your family in the VI for Transfer Day? I know it’s been a long time since I have posted (and I promise to start up again soon), but I wanted to reach out to you to let you know that the Caribbean Genealogy Library on St. Thomas urgently needs your help. With the centennial of Transfer Day approaching, Volunteers from the CGL are coming to NARA II in College Park looking for records from the transfer years.  These records are not well known as the microfilms and finding lists at the Archives focus on the pre-1917 timeframe. Members of the CGL are volunteering to travel here to find and digitize records of this time period to make them available to you.  Several researchers near the College Park area are volunteering their time to assist (including me!).  But the project isn’t free.  So, how can you help?  While people are donating their time, it still costs quite a bit to a project like this done.  To offset that cost, the CGL has a kickstarter page at http://kck.st/1ywwEZd.  Go to the page to read all about the project.  Their budget is $2,000, but only $1,245 has been pledged so far.    If you don’t know how kickstarter works, they don’t get a dime unless they meet their goal of $2,000. The kickstarter only runs through 11:13 PM, Sunday May 3, so there are only 7 days to go.

Preparing my Presentation for the AAGG Conference

I have been quite busy preparing my presentation for This Saturday’s AAGG Conference in Philadelphia on April 27. If you missed it, the announcement is on the AAGG website.

Although I write for a living, I was amazed at the difficulty in preparing a 50-minute talk on my research.  To make matters worse, the conference organizer, Carlean Mullen, asked me to start with the whole Caribbean and then my focus area, the Virgin Islands.  While I’m not what I would call an expert on the whole Caribbean, it was quite a task to squeeze it all in.

Add to that the challenge that few people in attendance will likely have any real understanding of the Virgin Islands beyond the fact that it’s a nice vacation destination.  Hundreds of years of history, social commentary, and my research methods and case studies smashed into a mere 50 minutes (oh, and the whole Caribbean too). To top it off, I never really learned PowerPoint.

After a good week of hard work (and learning PowerPoint), I think I have something that will be interesting for the novice and veteran alike.  During my research for the presentation I made some interesting discoveries about West Indian history that I will write about afterwards.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me so that I can represent our islands well.  I’ll be sure to post a report of how the day went.