APG: Election congrats to familiar faces

Some very familiar faces - from New Hampshire, Florida, Utah, New York and Israel - were among the 17 individuals recently elected to the Association of Professional Genealogists board.

Special congratulations from Tracing the Tribe go to the following:

Laura G. Prescott of Brookline, New Hampshire was elected president.

Andrew M. “Drew” Smith of Odessa, Florida, was elected secretary. Drew is the Florida Genealogical Society of Tampa president, and co-hosts (with George Morgan), the Genealogy Guys Podcast.

Among elected regional directors:

West Region: Suzanne Russo Adams AG of Utah, is a specialist in Italian research and employee of Ancestry.com.

I've known Suzanne for what seems like years and she was my host when I visited Ancestry's Provo headquarters a few years ago. We meet at the Southern California Genealogical Society's annual Jamborees as well as the annual IAJGS international Jewish genealogy conferences, where she is usually an Ancestry.com speaker.

Northeast Region: Debra Braverman of New York, is a national speaker and forensic genealogist who regularly testifies as an expert witness.

She is a JGS of New York member; we meet at the annual IAJGS conferences.

International Regions: Michael Goldstein of Israel, traces roots worldwide, specializing in family reunification, heir searches and Holocaust research.

Well-known to all genealogists in Israel, Michael wears several hats as president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and president of the Israel Genealogical Society. He speaks at Jewish genealogical societies in North America and at IAJGS conferences.

The Association of Professional Genealogists, established in 1979, represents nearly 2,000 genealogists, librarians, writers, editors, historians, instructors, booksellers, publishers, and others involved in genealogy-related businesses. APG encourages genealogical excellence, ethical practice, mentoring, and education. The organization also supports the preservation and accessibility of records useful to the fields of genealogy, local, and social history. Its members represent all 50 states, Canada, and 30 other countries.

Congratulations to everyone elected this year!

Jamboree: Attending bloggers

Here's the list of geneabloggers (and their blogs) who attended Jamboree 2009 in Burbank, California, thanks to Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers.com.

Check out some of these blogs!

It was a wonderful experience meeting so many people in person.

Lisa Alzo
The Accidental Genealogist
http://theaccidentalgenealogist.blogspot.com/

Bruce Buzbee
Roots Magic Blog
http://blog.rootsmagic.com/

Amy Coffin
We Tree
http://wetree.blogspot.com/

Lisa Louise Cooke
Genealogy Gems Podcast; Genealogy Gems News
http://www.genealogygemspodcast.com/
http://genealogygemspodcast.blogspot.com/

Stephen Danko
Steve’s Genealogy Blog
http://stephendanko.com/blog

Illya D’Addezio
Live Roots Blog
http://www.liveroots.com/blog

Schelly Talalay Dardashti
Tracing The Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog;
International Jewish Graveyard Rabbit;
MyHeritage Genealogy Blog
http://tracingthetribe.blogspot.com/
http://jewishgraveyardrabbit.blogspot.com/
http://www.myheritage.com/blogs/genealogyblog

Elyse Doerflinger
Elyse’s Genealogy Blog
http://elysesgenes.blogspot.com/

Kathryn Doyle
California Genealogical and Historical Society
http://calgensoc.blogspot.com/

Dick Eastman
Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter
http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy

Sheri Fenley
The Educated Genealogist
http://sherifenley.blogspot.com/

footnoteMaven
footnoteMaven
Shades of the Departed
http://www.footnotemaven.com/
http://www.shadesofthedeparted.com/

Jean Wilcox Hibben
Circle Mending
http://circlemending.blogspot.com/

Ruth Himan
Genealogy Is Ruthless Without Me
http://genealogyisruthlesswithoutme.blogspot.com/

Paula Hinkel
It Just Never Came Up;
SoCal Genealogy Jamboree
http://itjustnevercameup.blogspot.com/
http://genealogyjamboree.blogspot.com/

Jay Holladay
Jay’s Genealogy Blog
http://jaygenblog.wordpress.com/

Janet Hovorka
The Chart Chick
http://thechartchick.blogspot.com/

Ancestry Insider
The Ancestry Insider
http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/

Thomas Jay Kemp
Genealogy Bank
Ask The Genealogist
Genealogy Librarian News
http://blog.genealogybank.com/
http://askthegenealogist.blogspot.com/
http://genlibrarian.blogspot.com/

Susan Kitchens
Family Oral History Using Digital Tools
http://familyoralhistory.us/

Kiril Kundurazieff
Musings of a Mad Macedonian
http://www.madmacedonian.com/

Denise Levenick
The Family Curator
http://www.familycurator.blogspot.com/

Thomas MacEntee
Geneabloggers
Destination: Austin Family
http://www.geneabloggers.com/
http://destinationaustinfamily.blogspot.com/

Craig Manson
Geneablogie
http://blog.geneablogie.net/

Leslie Mehana
La Donna Bella
http://www.Squidoo.com/LaDonnaBella

Leland Meitzler
GenealogyBlog
http://www.genealogyblog.com/

George G. Morgan
George’s Genealogical Gleanings
The Genealogy Guys
http://georgegmorgan.livejournal.com/
http://genealogyguys.com/

Elizabeth O’Neal
Little Bytes of Life
The Graveyard Rabbit of the California Central Coast
http://www.littlebytesoflife.com/
http://centralcoast-graveyardrabbit.blogspot.com/

Cheryl Palmer
Heritage Happens
http://heritagehappens.blogspot.com/

Dear Myrtle
Dear Myrtle
Teach Genealogy
Internet Genealogy
http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/
http://blog.teachgenealogy.com/
http://blog.internet-genealogy.com/

Randy Seaver
Genea-Musings
The Geneaholic
Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe
http://www.geneamusings.com/
http://www.geneaholic.com/
http://cvgencafe.blogspot.com/

Drew Smith
Social Networking for Genealogists
The Genealogy Guys
http://snfg.blogspot.com/
http://genealogyguys.com/

Maureen Taylor
The Photo Detective
http://photodetective.blogspot.com/

Gini Webb
Ginisology
http://ginisology.blogspot.com/

Diane Wright
The Graveyard Rabbit Travels Wright
http://travelswright.blogspot.com/

What a group! If you want the real inside scoop on what happened at "Jamstock '09," read Elizabeth's Little Bytes of Life above.

Thomas is already planning blogger events for next year's Jamboree - can't wait to see who will participate then.

Jamboree: A great story

The Jamboree's "local paper" - The Burbank Leader - ran a nice story on the event, with a spotlight on how researchers are climbing their family trees with online help from blogs, Twitter and Facebook. It also revealed how ancestry hunting has become high-tech.

New technology, like blogs, are one of the new ways people are finding their relatives, said the event's co-chair Paula Hinkel, who was quoted in the story.

“There are lots of different blogs,” she said. “Some let you know about new products and services for genealogy research. Some are blogs about particular family research. For example, one of our bloggers put up all his family on a blog — text and pictures of his family history.”

Some blogs provide a specific type of family research, like Tracing the Tribe, which is just for those of Jewish faith, and then some bloggers create podcasts, she said.

“It all fits in this new world of communication,” she said. “We have a lot of Twitter people at the jamborees. It’s just another way to communicate with each other and find potential cousins. It’s all about finding family members who are trying to trace families.”

Hey, Paula - thanks for the pointer to Tracing the Tribe!

The article also covered the first day's free workshops, including the Kids Family History Camp, which attracted more than 85 young people, ages 8-16. Paula also said that many society members started out as Boy and Girl Scouts doing it for merit badges. She still has her badge.

Paula and I share many ideas on how to bring family history research to our young people, who will be taking over from us in the future. It is a great achievement to get a young interested in this search.

“One of the things that society members worry about is who is going to take over our research when we are gone,” she said. “When we get a kid interested, it’s a win for us.”

It is an excellent article touching on many important points.

Read the complete story at the link above.

Jamboree: Final Day

This posting is a bit out of order as the second day of Jamboree was so full that I'm still trying to get it into a more readable format.

Delayed jetlag finally hit me yesterday afternoon after my friend Hilary and I got back to her home. Of course, the delicious lunch at Outback might have had something to do with an overwhelming desire to sleep. I had two long naps and finally woke at 4.30am and started writing. Hope to get a lot posted today.

Overall comments on Jamboree 2009: Phenomenal! Excellent presentations, many diverse topics, expert speakers, and much more.

I can't wait to see the video podcast (recorded Friday) with Drew and George of the Genealogy Guys. I also recorded an audio podcast with Lisa Cooke Sunday morning.

There were lunches with old friends, as well as discussions about Philly 2009 and Los Angeles 2010, several breaking news items that can't be revealed just yet, and great meetings with interesting people.

The high points were many and the most interesting was having so many geneabloggers in one place at one time. There was so much to see that we had to make time either to blog or to attend sessions - it was hard to do both, but I have lots of notes to put into posting format.

We learned, after our first annual blogger dinner, that we are a really noisy crowd - thanks, Thomas, for arranging that!

My mini-computer held up very well and I was delighted with its performance, especially after procuring a nine-cell battery, lasting about 10 hours on a full charge. I'm glad I won't ever have to lug my ancient HP dinosaur anywhere else. Thomas MacEntee of Geneabloggers.com has a black Asus (mine is a white Acer) and we were often at the same table or session working side-by-side.

My camera (unfortunately) didn't perform as well, but geneablogger friends are sending me the photos they took, so I'll be able to post some of them.

While each of us in the geneablogger community knew we were an interesting bunch, nothing is as good as meeting each other in person.

Ancestry invited the "group" to a breakfast presentation, which we can't yet share. I fully expect that in the future other gen companies will also see us as a focused community and arrange special events.

Making personal connections in this way is good for everyone - for the corporate organizations with something to say and news to provide, and for the geneablogging community - as we each provide individual takes on that information.

Now that I have woken up, I have a lot of work to do today.

After a few days in Los Angeles seeing friends and relatives (and a few meetings on future events), I head north on Friday to Los Altos (near Stanford University and Google) to my good gen friends Rosanne and Dan Leeson. I also hope to see fellow geneablogger Steve Danko who works near there.

Judy Simon of New York (and who co-admins our IberianAshkenaz DNA project) will also be in the area visiting her daughter and we plan to get together. A visit to the Sephardic synagogue Ahabat Shalom in San Jose is in the workings (they offer an active program for Conversos), along with a visit to another old friend from Iran who lives in Monterey.

A high point was visiting with my old friend Steffani who came up from Anaheim Hills to attend most of the conference. Old friends are the best and, despite the intervening years, our shared experiences in Iran truly bonded us very strongly in so many ways.

We are already planning to see each other in June 2010, when I'll be in Southern California for at least a month bridging the Jamboree in mid-June and the Los Angeles edition of the Jewish genealogy conference in mid-July. There's also the possibility of an East Coast speaking tour in May.

In a few weeks, I head east to New York City, then down to Philadelphia for the 29th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (August 2-7), back to New York and then return to Tel Aviv.

Jamboree: Day One

What a day!

I arrived very early at the hotel with fellow Mogilev researcher Hilary Henkin. Checked in and we went down for a good breakfast.

At the next table were two of the NEHGS staffers; one of whom had a Jewish genealogy question. Hilary had some errands to run after breakfast and I wandered over to speaker registration to pick up the syllabus, name tag, and daily planner.

As I was also representing MyHeritage.com, I was wearing a MyHeritage hat.

This morning, the Genealogy Guys interviewed me on a video podcast (vodcast), discussing DNA testing, general Jewish genealogy, Ashkenazi and Sephardi genealogy and MyHeritage.com. Today was the first time that Drew and George were video podcasting; they did 10 interviews. Dick Eastman and Matthew Poe are also interviewing for RootsTelevision.com.
The meeting rooms were filled to capacity in today's sessions. A reliable conference source says that there were about 1,100 pre-registered attendees and that walk-ins will likely add several hundred more to the final count.

However, even with all these people, the room arrangements seem adequate, with some meeting rooms located in the main building and all the meeting rooms in the convention center building.

Geneabloggers.com had goody bags for each geneablogger, while Thomas MacEntee handed out Mardi Gras beads to each blogger.

We began to gather in various corners of the lobby and the convention center. Kathryn Doyle of the California Genealogy Society, Sheri Fenley, footnoteMaven, Susan Kitchens and I were in the lobby; Elyse Doerflinger joined us. Back in the convention center, Steve Danko was there waiting to connect with a fan. Randy Seaver of Geneamusings was there and we were happy to see Craig Manson.

I was waiting for an old friend to arrive. Steffani and I were friends back in Teheran and hadn't seen each other since then. She found me on Facebook when our genealogy blogging community joined en masse. We had a nice lunch and reminisced about our lives way back when and caught up each other's lives today.

The vendor room was really busy, and every seat was full in the tech center - where people could try out - for free - the many available databases.

I spoke to the Footnote.com people and heard about some special future plans that cannot be shared at this time. Be patient - Tracing the Tribe readers will be very interested in those future plans when they are made public.

It was a great honor to meet Tony Burroughs while he was at the FamilyTreeDNA booth with Bennett Greenspan.

Bennett's new talk on DNA for females, adoptees and lineage connections was based on three fascinating case studies, which I'll talk about in a post tomorrow. Jan Meisels Allen of the JGS of Ventura County - and an IAJGS board member - was in the front row!

After a great dinner with Bennett and Max, and a quick talk with Suzanne Russo Adams of Ancestry, everyone decided to turn in and rest up for Day Two.

FootnoteMaven and I had some Internet problems, which were resolved by the engineering staff. Two bloggers pounding away on keyboards were the only sounds, until I began dozing off at the keyboard.

For now, it's time to get some sleep, as tomorrow will be even busier as it starts at an early morning Ancestry. com-sponsored breakfast on Family Tree Maker 2010.

More tomorrow.