Rick Crume, expert in online and distant resources, to speak at OGS Conference 2010

Posted by conference on December 26, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Innovations Stream, Speakers and Program | Be the First to Comment

Pretend for a moment you live in Glyndon, Minnesota (population 1,155), just miles from the North Dakota state line. Imagine further you have ancestry in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States, as well as New Brunswick and the British Isles. Welcome to the world of Rick Crume, a genealogist since age 14, and by necessity a leading expert in online resources and the holdings of distant repositories.

In fact Rick is author of Plugging Into Your Past: How to Find Real Family History Online. He also created the Genealogical Library Master Catalog, which lists the genealogy holdings of many American libraries. He will give four lectures at Conference 2010 on different aspects of these areas of expertise.

A sixth-generation Minnesotan, Rick studied at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and spent his junior year studying in Bogotá, Colombia. Later he learned that his distant relative John H. Pennington, who lived in Glyndon in the 1880s, also lived in Bogotá in the 1890s while building a railroad in Colombia. Rick further discovered that Pennington married a Colombian woman, having neglected to divorce his American wife first. So in 1895 Colombian authorities charged him with bigamy and unsuccessfully sought his extradition.

Rick seems to be a more upstanding fellow than his distant relative. As you can see from the photo, he is a competitive runner (almost 700 miles this year). More relevant to our immediate concerns, he is a contributing editor for Family Tree Magazine and has written for Family Chronicle, Internet Genealogy and Discovering Family History magazines, as well as society journals in the U.S., New Brunswick and Wales. While you’re unlikely to be able to visit him in Minnesota, you can drop into his informative website any day: http://onelibrary.com.