ROOTS & BRANCHES

Every so often in my 27 years of writing “Roots & Branches” every week, I think back a man who was briefly my newspaper colleague, the late Bill Lumpkin, who was sports editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald when I was a copy editor at the paper in my first job after college.

When I was at the newspaper, “Lump” was already mostly a columnist, and once in a while you could tell that he didn’t have one particular topic that was bubbling to the top of his brain.

Those columns would begin “Hangin’ out wash …” and then would segue into a few bullet points.

So, here for the first time since Lump died in 2021 at age 92, is a “hangin’ out wash” column of my own …

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First up, I’m back from the usual delightful Ohio Genealogical Society conference, which was held for the third year in a row at the Kalahari Resort near Sandusky, Ohio. There was a bit of “Kalahari fatigue” but I understand that the three-pack was due to circumstances that OGS couldn’t control (first a make-good from a COVID-19 cancellation in 2020 and then the closure of a venue in another city).

Planning for next year’s conference is underway for a venue north of Cincinnati, which will offer the welcome change of place for this fine regional conference.

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I won’t be going to the National Genealogical Society’s conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the end of the month. While I’m sure there will be lots of great activities going on—and I had been scheduled to speak in Louisville the year of the pandemic, only to have that gig go virtual!—I decided to not go when it was scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, since I like visiting family cemeteries.

NGS belatedly unveiled a virtual option for the conference, but its not what I consider to be a real good one: Virtual attendees will have access to recorded lectures 48 to 72 hours after they are given live. All the for same price as in-person attendance, which is $385 for a two-day conference. More info is available at the NGS conference website, https://conference.ngsgenealogy.org/

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In-person conferences continue to have difficulties putting all the pieces together after the pandemic created a wonderful world of online learning.

I’ve been a conference chair three times. In 2008 I ran the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Philadelphia, lost a bunch of money despite having a well-reviewed event. In 2021, I co-chaired the International German Genealogical Partnership online conference and made a ton of money with a conference people loved, and repeated that for Pennsylvania’s Genealogy Event (PaGE) in 2023 (people loved it and it was a modest financial loss for the sponsor Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania).

I still maintain that some sort of hybrid solution will be the one that works, but no one else seems to be catching on the innovations that IGGP and PaGE debuted. But that needs a column all to itself.