Speaking in Texas

I'll be speaking in the Dallas area on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. Here are details. (Link.)

A quick update since I'm not posting much. I've finished a preliminary draft of my book and it needs some revisions, which I will begin when the children start school at the end of August.

Here are some of the other things happening while I'm not blogging.

* I recently attended and presented at the 2nd Annual Meeting of Sons and Daughters of the U.S. Middle Passage. Once again, a delightful conference.

* I've been copyediting and updating a friend's manuscript for publication. It's a great project, and I am delighted to get to help.

* Another project I've contributed to is the amazing and newly-released database A Century of Black Mormons.

* A new part-time job. Okay, so it's barely a job; it involved a good amount of work up front but now it's two or three hours every couple of weeks. It's three minutes from my house, and I can set my own hours, and it wouldn't come close to paying any of our bills, but it's nice to have a new cast of characters in my life.

* I'm slowly identifying all the people mentioned in the Winter Quarters Burial Records and gathering materials related to the cemetery. So far I've been able to identify most everyone, but there are some elusive people. It started as a casual project, and I still spend at most an hour a week on it, but once I'm finished identifying everyone, the plan is to write a journal article.

* I continue to direct our local Family History Center. We've finished a transition from mostly microfilm-based operations to mostly computer-based operations. It was a huge project, but the center is now working better for our patrons. Some of the others involved in the project and I took a field trip recently and helped another center make the same change. It was a lot of work, but things are now up to date.

* And, I'm planning on what to do once the book is done. More about that later!