Posted by conference on December 26, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Innovations Stream, Speakers and Program | 
Rick Crume, the runner.
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.
Posted by conference on December 20, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Registration Updates |
Online registration is now open for the most action-packed, star-studded OGS Conference ever.
Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, now’s the time to register for the Ontario Genealogical Society’s Conference 2010 to be held in Toronto May 14-16.
- Check out the content-rich program, packed with more sessions than ever before.
- See leading experts talk in Canada or at Conference for the very first time; or hear returning speakers with the very highest ratings received at Conference 2009.
- Consider one of the pre-Conference programs on Thursday, May 13—a Hands-on Research Excursion or “Libraries and Genealogy” presented in conjunction with the Ontario Library Association.
- Shop in the spacious 10,000-square-foot Marketplace just steps from the lecture rooms.
Convenient to airport, highways, GO and TTC, the Conference hotel offers an early-bird rate until January 8—and it’s the same rate as in 2004, the kind of comfort and joy we can really appreciate!
OGS Conference 2010
Essentials, Innovations & Delights
May 14-16, 2010
Doubletree by Hilton–Toronto Airport
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.
