Gearing up for Spring

This weekend I’ve been taking stock of my calendar. I’m co-chairing Minnesota Genealogical Society’s spring conference April 27 and 28. This will be an exciting event focusing on Central and Eastern European Genealogy. Our featured speaker is John Philip Colletta, Ph.D. John will present his lecture Discovering the REAL Stories of Your Immigrant Ancestors Friday April 27 after a dessert reception. Saturday April 28 will be a full-day conference with two more of John’s marvelous lectures and fifteen breakout sessions. MGS’ conference partners are the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International, the Germanic Genealogy Society, the Polish Genealogical Society of Minnesota, the Pommern Regional Group of Minnesota, and the brand-new Romanian Genealogy Society. Each partner society is providing a three-session conference track focusing on their ethnic group, with MGS providing a general genealogy track as the fifth breakout track. We’ve now finalized our venue and program arrangements; our next big push will be planning the publicity campaign for the conference and setting up registration. We’re using basecamp (used by the ProGen study groups) as a web-based project management environment–so far it’s working great.

Meanwhile, MGS’ winter/spring class schedule is in full swing. We held one day of classes in January, as well as our quarterly Members Morning featuring our three learning groups (Beginners Group, Writers Group, Research Study Group). We kicked off our February class offerings with today’s Photography for Genealogists class and are working up to March Madness next month. My role as Education Committee Chair is class scheduling and administration. I’m also on deck to co-teach our fifteen-hour Genealogy 101 course starting St. Patrick’s Day, as well as our two-hour census class in April at the Minnesota Historical Society. Although I’ve taught the census class before, this one will require some prep–I’ll be condensing my material on the federal and state censuses in order to make room for new material introducing the 1940 census.

In my private practice, I have a Genealogy 101 course for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute also starting up in March, as well as some standalone programs for libraries and genealogical societies. The first of those will be my Organizing lecture at Dakota County Genealogical Society in March. I always love teaching organizing. It’s such fun!

And then there are my private clients, FamilySearch indexing, and personal research and writing. Looks like a busy spring!

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