I recently watched the recorded version of Legacy’s Sharing Genealogy Electronically webinar, presented by Geoff Rasmussen. The Legacy Online Store describes this webinar as:
Sharing Genealogy Electronically. Join Legacy Family Tree’s Geoff Rasmussen as he presents a live workshop to both 1) the West Valley Genealogical Society in Youngtown, Arizona and 2) to a live webinar audience. The class will teach methods of sharing your genealogy in the form of a printed book, print-on-demand publishing, websites, and shareable CDs. The class, being taught live at the West Valley Genealogical Society’s library, is part of a 4-week Advanced Legacy course. Teaching to both a live brick-and-mortar audience AND to a live online audience at the same time is something we have never tried before. Maybe it will work. Maybe it … well … we’ll be positive here and hope for the best.
I’ll be honest. . .I did not expect to learn much of anything from this webinar. After all, I have a website and a blog — I share my genealogy electronically all the time. I was pleasantly surprised.
The webinar covered much more than I thought it would:
- publishing to book (this is the section I really got into)
- publishing to the Internet
- publishing to CD
- publishing to DVD
Publishing to Book
This may seem like an odd addition to a webinar on electronic publishing; however Geoff goes over some of the pros and cons of traditional print publishing vs. print-on-demand; he also gives step-by-step instructions for creating a book at Lulu.com.
He then offers a set of strategic guidelines for creating a book:
- Do the research
- Create the skeleton using one’s genealogy software program
- Export the skeleton to a word-processing program
- Add the “meat” – photos, scanned documents, etc.
- Generate a Table of Contents and Index
- Publish the book
In Item 2 – Create the skeleton, Geoff goes step-by-step through the process of generating a book. The instructions are Legacy-specific (no surprise, there), but I think there would be many similarities with other genealogy programs.
Publishing to CD or DVD
These are the other sections of the webinar that I found intriguing. Geoff walked through the process of creating multi-media presentations using a program called Passage Express, which is available as a stand-alone product or as a free add-on to Legacy. These multi-media presentations were so impressive and would be a great way to share family history with those family members who are not so interested in the genealogy.
Much more information was covered during the webinar and I consider the time as 109 minutes well-spent.
I’m giving away a copy of this webinar. Click here to see how you can enter the drawing. If you would like to purchase a copy, you can do so at the Legacy Online Store.
*Disclosure: I received a free copy of this webinar on CD as a blogger gift at SCGS Jamboree. I’m also an affiliate of the Legacy Online Store and receive a small commission on any purchases made if you click on the links from my webste, although your cost remains the same..