About the Blogger
Byron Holdiman
Welcome to the Gen Tech Trek (Genealogy Technology Trek) Blog. I am Byron Holdiman, the blogger of the Gen Tech Trek.
Childhood and Youth
A little about myself, I was raised in northeastern Washington State near my grandparents. During my childhood and youth, I spent most of the summers with at least one of my grandparents. I loved sitting around in the evening and listening to the stories of their life. When I was in high school, my grandmother’s aunt moved to our town very close to the High School. Once a week, I would go visit her at her apartment and would listen to her stories about being raised in a large family in Missouri (or Missoura, as she pronounced it), growing broom corn, packing up and moving to Oklahoma via horse and wagon, and many more stories. Now I wished I would have recorded those visits.
Heading off to College and being bitten by the Bug
After graduation, I went to Brigham Young University (BYU) majoring in Computer Science. During my first semester, I took a genealogy class. While the foundations were there prior to taking the class, I was fully bitten by the Genealogy Bug (as I am sure many of you can greatly sympathize with). BYU was starting a new History degree with emphasis in Genealogy. I decided to do a double major in Computer Science and History/Genealogy. BYU built a new religious education building which including a computer lab specifically for genealogical research. I was hired as one of the first lab assistants and worked there for three years helping students individually and within classes in using the computer as a research and database tool for their genealogy. At this time, I met the love of my life, we were married, and had our daughter join the family. As I started evaluating graduation plans, I realized that double majoring in a technical science field and a humanities field was going to take me the same amount of time as if I did one major and went on for a Masters degree. I dropped the Computer Science major and kept the History/Genealogy major.
As I was looking at graduate programs, one of the professors came to me and asked if I had ever thought about becoming a librarian. He told me that as he watches me work with the students and get so excited with them when they have success in their searching, he has thought many times this guy would make a fantastic librarian. I had never thought of becoming a librarian before but started looking into it. That next fall, our family packed up and moved across the country to Florida as I attending the University of South Florida (USF) within their Library and Information Science (LIS) program. During the first year, I got to work alongside the archivist and reference librarians in the Special Collections Department of the USF Library. At this time our second child and first son joined our family. The second year, I worked as a lab assistant in the LIS Computer Lab and taught courses in Introduction to the Internet.
After College – Working in the Genealogical World
Once I graduated and started looking for a job, we moved again to stay with my in-laws in New York. Before leaving Florida though, my supervisor for the LIS Computer Lab asked if I wanted to help him with a weekly chat that he hosted on Computers and Genealogy through AOL. So for a few years, I hosted the chat with him each Sunday night as well as maintained the Computer Resources section of the Genealogy Forum on AOL. While in New York, our third child, another son, joined our family.
A friend from my BYU days was starting up a genealogy database company in the Pittsburgh area and we moved to Pittsburgh to help him with his company. One of the major projects was the creation of a CD containing the full-text and full-images of the periodicals for the Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society. From there, I started working at the regional library network for the Mid-Atlantic States as a Library Consultant for technical support and training with preservation, electronic resources, and Inter-Library Loan. In this position, I was able to conduct workshops and presented at several conferences about helping patron with genealogical research using available resources on the Internet. During this time our last child, our third son, joined our family.
When the regional library network announced the closure of their field office in Pittsburgh and centralizing everything in Philadelphia, we decided to stay in the Pittsburgh area. The Library of Congress was just bringing a program to the area on providing professional development sessions for educators on using primary sources (historical materials) to engage the students in the learning process. I was hired as the Digital Preservationist/trainer at a university south of Pittsburgh. One day my supervisor asked if I thought we could help students conduct oral history interviews with veterans for inclusion in the Veterans History Project. Having taken an oral history class at BYU, I told him that I thought it would be a good experience and I really enjoyed the class and conducting oral histories interviews. I could not have imagined the success of the endeavor though. At the beginning, many of the students did not want to talk to some old person about their war experiences. Afterward though, we received letters back from so many that their attitude changed during the interview and they had found a new hero in their life, the veteran that they interviewed.
While at a meeting at the Library of Congress, the dean of the School of Education from a university in western Illinois came to the meeting to announce that their project was in search of a new grant director. With my interest in history, I knew about this area and some important events that had taken place there. Upon returning home from the meeting, I talked to my wife about the position and applied for the position. That next spring, our family moved half-way across the country to Illinois as I become the grant director of the Library of Congress program in western Illinois. Since this area has one of the largest veterans homes in the United States, we have continued to help students conduct oral history interviews with the veterans to include in the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. I have also been conducting Cemetery Tour workshops where the participants select a tombstone (from a preselected group) and does research on that person locating primary sources about the individual. In the afternoon, we go to the cemetery and conduct a primary source tour as each person tells about their person and the primary sources that they found about the person while we are at the tombstone.
The Birth of a Blog
Recently, I was participating in a training program for teaching online courses. As part of the training, we created a 5-minute tutorial video. I created my on looking up specific resources for genealogy on the Library of Congress website. While creating it and especially after receiving some very positive feedback from the instructor and other participants, I thought that this would actually make a good blog/vlog to regularly create short tutorial videos on various online resources for genealogical research. So this is the birth of a blog, the Gen Tech Trek. I hope you find the information useful in getting to know your ancestor better.