Posted by conference on January 9, 2010 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Essentials Stream, Speakers and Program | 
Speaker Alison Hare
If one of Alison Hare’s ancestors had been named John, Canada might never have gained one of its most accomplished genealogists. As it happens, Busteed Green’s bizarre first name, observed on a grave marker in the early 1980s, intrigued the young Ottawa-based reporter. Soon she was engrossed in genealogy, with Busteed proving a elusive target (although she did eventually track him down). When Alison’s son reached school age in the mid 1990s, she decided to focus on genealogy. By 1999, she had received her CG designation from the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG). And as we approach Conference 2010, where she will give two lectures, Alison now has 29 years of genealogical experience as a researcher, lecturer and editor.
Along the way, she leaves a trail of accomplishment: three-time recognition for the quality of her lectures presented to the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa; induction into that society’s Hall of Fame; genealogist-in-residence at the Ottawa Public Library in 1999; a trustee of BCG; and an active member of the Ontario Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists.
As a former journalist, Alison applies great care to her genealogical writing and editing. Her article “Searching for Greens at the Time of Peter Robinson” was published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly in March 2007. The Ottawa Branch News, newsletter of OGS’s Ottawa Branch, won numerous Marion Keffer awards under her editorship between 1997 and 2002.
At Conference 2010 Alison will speak on citations for Canadians on Saturday and then on Sunday will present her fascinating case study of the victims of the 1854 London cholera outbreak (one of whom was her ancestor).
Posted by conference on December 7, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Speakers and Program |
Amy Wachs Fellner, shown here in Latvia, will speak on Saturday, May 15 and Sunday, May 16.
Google “Moldova”, “Fulbright Scholar” and “the Arizona State Board of Tax Appeals” and only one person in the whole wide world shows up in this eclectic search: Amy Wachs Fellner, J.D., a lawyer, university instructor and avid family historian with considerable hands-on research experience in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. You’ll soon be able to add “OGS Conference 2010” to the list of applicable search terms.
Amy taught as a Fulbright Scholar in 2002 at the Riga Graduate School of Law in Latvia and more recently in 2006 and 2007 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Chisinau (formerly known by its Russian name of Kishinev and site of a violent pogrom in 1903), capital of the Republic of Moldova. She took advantage of these professional opportunities to do extensive genealogical research at state archives in Eastern Europe and will give two lectures on Sunday at Conference 2010 on topics related to this expertise.
Educated at the University of Rochester and the University of Michigan Law School, Amy is a trained mediator and arbitrator. Before relocating to Arizona, where she sits on the state Board of Tax Appeals, she served as in-house counsel to a Fortune 50 multinational corporation. She has been teaching at Arizona State University since January 1999, and developed and taught a full-semester course on the topic of “Eastern Europe: Law, Politics and Justice”. She has also taught genealogy seminars at Arizona State University and has spoken extensively on genealogy topics and taught genealogy workshops throughout the United States.
One of the talks for which Amy is best known is a case study using the example of screen legends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to demonstrate how American records provide helpful clues to identifying earlier generations in Europe. Attendees at Conference 2010 will have the opportunity to hear this fascinating lecture on Saturday afternoon.
Posted by conference on October 15, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Italian Research Stream, Pro/Advanced Stream, Speakers and Program |
John Phillip Colletta of Washington, DC.
We are fortunate that John Philip Colletta, PhD, will be a mainstay of the Ontario Genealogical Society’s Conference 2010. Entertaining, knowledgeable and experienced, John is one of America’s most popular genealogical lecturers. People are still raving about his 2008 appearance in Toronto, where he spoke to the Ontario Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Conference organizers jumped at the opportunity to bring him back to Canada.
We will all get to hear John’s humour and wisdom during the closing plenary on Sunday afternoon. His topic promises to be quite a sensation: “Hacks and Hookers and Putting Up Pickles: Snares of Yesteryear’s English”.
But John’s contribution to Conference 2010 actually begins on Friday afternoon when he will present two lectures in the Professional/Advanced stream: “Stories that Instruct: Using Case Studies to Teach Genealogy Methodology” and “Principles of Good Writing and Good Storytelling”.
Then on Saturday, for a special group of family historians, John will be hard at work providing the backbone of the Italian ancestry program. After all, he literally wrote the book on researching Italian ancestry.
Sunday won’t be a day of rest, however. In addition to the closing plenary in the afternoon, John will give a two-part morning lecture on “Writing a Narrative History”.
Based in Washington, DC, John taught classes for the National Archives and Smithsonian Institution for 21 years. Now he lectures nationally and teaches at Samford University and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. His publications include dozens of journal articles, two manuals, They Came in Ships and Finding Italian Roots, as well as a narrative family history, Only a Few Bones: A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy and Its Aftermath. This most recent book is a history of the German-speaking merchants of the Mississippi Delta during Reconstruction; it is written around the mysterious destruction of John’s great great grandfather’s country store, and its five unfortunate inhabitants.
You can read more about John at his website.
Posted by conference on September 5, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Tours and Events, Visiting Toronto |
Toronto was home to a vast number of Irish immigrants who settled here from the city’s beginnings as the Town of York in 1793. On Friday, May 14, you can join the Toronto’s Irish Heritage bus tour for a day exploring the Irish connections in Toronto.
The tour will begin at the Conference 2010 hotel. Participants will travel by chartered bus to Ireland Park on Toronto’s waterfront. The Park, opened in 2007, commemorates the arrival of some 38,000 Irish Famine refugees who inundated Toronto (population 20,000) in 1847.
We will continue on to the Corktown area of Toronto, named for settlers from County Cork, and explore various venues where they lived and worked, including Little Trinity Anglican Church. Participants will relax over lunch at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, the oldest existing ‘free’ school in Canada.
In the afternoon we’ll visit the splendid St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto’s first Roman Catholic parish, established in 1822.
We will continue our journey to the Necropolis Cemetery and the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto. Cabbagetown’s name has its roots from the cabbages and other vegetables that were grown by the thrifty Irish immigrants who settled in the area. Cabbages grew readily in the sandy soil and provided an excellent food source. The Necropolis was the second non-sectarian cemetery in Toronto. Opened in the 1850s, it provided the final resting place for a number of Irish immigrants who lived in the area and worked in the factories along the Don River. We will also visit the graves of other people who helped shape our history such as Thornton Blackburn, an escaped slave from Virginia who provided the impetus for the underground railway into Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie a leader of the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion and Joseph Burr Tyrrell who found dinosaur bones in the Alberta Badlands.
Watch for more details about the Toronto’s Irish Heritage Bus Tour when registration opens this fall.
Posted by conference on August 23, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Delights Stream, Speakers and Program |
The “Delights” of our theme—Essentials, Innovations & Delights—will be very evident in the Ontario Genealogical Society’s Conference 2010 program. The more than 70 plenary and concurrent lectures will include a generous sprinkling of genealogical case histories.
Case histories—lectures that tell the story of how a researcher discovered a particular individual or family—might just demonstrate a new source or technique that can be directly applied your own research. They will certainly show you how one piece of information provides clues to the next, and how the pieces can be drawn together to paint a more complete picture of an ancestor’s life.
The case histories selected for the Conference 2010 program cover a wide variety of subjects, locations, and time periods. There’s sure to be something for everyone.
The proposals intrigued our program committee, and we hope they will inspire and “delight” you.
