Arrived in Chicago

Okay, I'm here Monday morning at the International JGS meeting in Chicago. I had hoped to have caught up on the last few weeks by now, but did not manage that, so this week will be something of a flash forward. I hope to record my observations from the conference several times a day.

After registering, I was going to graze a couple of the early morning sessions, but instead settled in at the lobby cybercafe, where Shelley Dardashti and some other bloggers were already at work. As I chatted with Shelley, she also greeted Logan Kleinwaks, the web developer of a new site called genealogyindexer.org.

He uses optical character recognition software to automatically index a huge list of historical directories. Shelley sat him down for a demo and interview, and I sat in while they talked. I won't go into the details since I don't want to scoop Shelley's story. All I will say is the Logan's site looks incredibly useful. More about that later.