November Evening Meeting

Hi all,
I'm really sorry if you missed last evening's meeting because it turned out to be very enlightening. Our scheduled speaker was unable to make it but gave us a week or so notice which is always helpful. Ann Braasch scurried into action to find a replacement topic and began organizing a "Genealogy Gathering".

The focus of the program highlighted the varied ways our Society serves our members and the genealogical community:
We heard about the work being done by our volunteers who maintain the website and its many facets, including all the effort put forth by those who indexed and digitized the records we provide there.
Always laboring but seldom celebrated are the ever faithful crew indexing the old Elgin newspapers; we also gave kudos to the library staff who enter those records into the online library database making them available to the world.
Our donations to the 50/50 program has helped to purchase another 20 books for the library's genealogical collection.
Another service rarely mentioned is the research done by our EGS genealogist, Judy Van Dusen. Judy shared with us the procedure followed when providing this service as well as a few interesting situations she's encountered. Judy also mentioned the tremendous work done in years past by the late Vi Swanson, a previous EGS genealogist.
We also talked about one of our newest tools, this blog. Our hope is that members well come to rely on the blog to keep them updated on the latest events for EGS but also that they will use it to post their successes, newly found websites or helps, request for information, and a myriad of other purposes.

For me, the meeting was a reminder that our Society as vital to the Genealogical community today as it was at it's inception 37 years ago.

Hope to see you at the annual meeting on December 1st.