Why “Essentials, Innovations & Delights”?

Posted by conference on June 27, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, The Making of Conference 2010 | Be the First to Comment

On February 9, 2009, after much discussion and “wordsmithing”, the Conference 2010 organizing committee wholeheartedly approved the Conference theme: Essentials, Innovations and Delights.

So why do we need a theme anyway? And why this particular theme?

The first question is easier. We had to set a direction that would guide the call for papers and, later, our program choices. It had to suggest benefits that would attract registrants and serve them well. And it had to provide a vision for the Conference that would engage and motivate our 26 committee members over the next 18 months.

The theme needed to appeal to both beginners and seasoned researchers, as well as everyone in between, all of whom are busy and have many other demands on their time and discretionary spending. We decided therefore that we have to deliver a content-rich Conference in which every lecture is relentlessly practical or inspiring in order to earn the support of prospective registrants.

So how to be relentlessly practical? Two ways: You offer necessary information about unfamiliar topics, “Essentials”; or you provide new information about familiar ones, “Innovations”.

Bear in mind that we’re all beginners when we embark on research in an unfamiliar record class or a new jurisdiction. So we all need “Essentials” at some point.

Likewise keeping up with “Innovations” in sources and techniques is essential to genealogists at all levels at all times.

“Delights” is the best word we could think of to describe the magic that happens when the dry documents yield to the tenacity and imagination of the researcher to bring an ancestor or a family “to life”. It is the reason we all do what we do.