J.D. Smith will present “It's All 'Dutch' to Me: Using the Sounds of German to Improve Your German-American Research.” Have you ever come across a German or German-speaking ancestor in U. S. records, only to find their name spelled five different ways? Those "misspellings" might be important clues. Because many U. S. records before 1890 used phonetic rather than actual spellings for names, learning the basic sounds of German can help untangle even the trickiest of these situations, and may even help you learn useful details about your ancestor's German-language heritage or even their place of origin. This talk will cover the sounds of spoken German, as well as a few regional dialects, and how to use those sounds to decode difficult records in both English and German. It will also introduce the basics of reading German-language church records.

David Sapp will present “Traveling the Backroads and Backwoods: Looking for Boone County’s Cemeteries.” Extensive work in the field coupled with lots of research in various repositories resulted in a large database about Boone County's cemeteries, some of which had not been transcribed before. David Sapp will update us on what he learned. While it has not yet been published, the information is available to anyone interested by contacting him. If you have a brick wall of a cemetery problem in Boone County, you will want to know about this work.