New England Regional Genealogical Conference

Posted by my wife Elizabeth on her blog.
http://kippeeb.blogspot.com/ Monday April 15th, 2011

We attended the New England Regional Genealogical Conference in Springfield, MA along with searches in cemeteries in that area and then a workshop with the New York Biographical and Genealogical Society at Elmsford, NY. We had a really busy time and good success with finding particular graves in cemeteries (my husband's New England ancestors).

The Conference was excellent and the facility very good. There were over 800 attendees at the Conference which ran for four days. I attended a lecture at every session and picked either DNA, Irish, French-Canadian or English Records for my choices. The lectures were all very good and it was interesting attending a conference dedicated to New England Research.

I will write about the lectures that I especially found interesting and could apply to my research. The lecture on autosomal testing was particularly interesting for me. I have a better understanding of how I can use the results that have been given to me by the testing company. I hope to persuade some of my nearer relatives (all my matches are 4th cousin or greater and all of them are actually more than 4th cousin thus far as I have managed to figure out who most of my 4th cousins are) to test just to see the commonalities between them and myself.

One cemetery that I found fascinating was at Sleepy Hollow, NY. This is an enormous cemetery and there are two large Kipp plots which was our reason for visiting it. Washington Irving is buried there and we stopped to see his family's plot. There are several very very large mausoleums there for old New York families of the area including the Roosevelt family.