ROOTS & BRANCHES

The Ohio Genealogical Society’s conference earlier this month was a reminder that great in-person family history experiences do exist.

As I often do with a column such as this, I being with the disclaimer: I’ve been a speaker at the spring OGS conference for more than a dozen years now and find the people who run it always to be enjoyable and accommodating.

But my affection for this event runs a lot deeper than that.

In fact, I’ll credit Elissa Scalise Powell from western Pennsylvania for first putting the OGS conference on my radar screen more than 20 years ago when I was first executive director at Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. She noted that the people attending OGS was hungry for Pennsylvania topics, in large part since so many of them had ancestors who passed through the Keystone State.

I never pulled the trigger on attending back then, but in 2010 I finally applied to be a speaker as I was spreading my wings into more venues and gaining a decent reputation as a speaker and German-genealogy specialist. Except for one year in which I skipped applying, they’ve been kind enough to put me on the program every year since!

When OGS resumed having in-person conferences in 2022 after a COVID cancellation in ’20 and a virtual-only edition in ’21, I literally didn’t make in from the parking lot of the conference before an excited registrant corralled me to take a look at vital record from Pennsylvania to get my advice!

And once inside the venue in ’22, I didn’t get further than the lobby before another registrant told me she’d be stopping by my exhibit table with a German script baptism to help transcribe and translate.

I parlayed all this enthusiasm into putting together a “dream team” (retired Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Department chief Marilyn Holt, Genealogy Quick Start producer Shamele Jordon, and Katy Bodenhorn from Historical Society of Pennsylvania) workshop on Pennsylvania for the ’23 conference that was so popular it sold out twice!

This year, I was given the designation of “featured speaker” since I was tapped to talk at one of the OGS luncheons.

The conference featured MyHeritage as a lead sponsor and had the eminent Craig Roberts Scott available as an answer man in the exhibit hall. The keynote speaker was Sunny Morton, who spoke on the 1950s (the theme for the conference was “Rockin’ Around Your Family Tree”).

All of which is preface to next year’s conference, which carries the theme of “Light Up Your Genealogy” and will be held April 30–May 3, 2025, at Kalahari Resort & Conference Center in Sandusky, Ohio.

I’m looking forward to being there!