WOW ! Friday was quite a day. 13 hours total including the banquet. Lots of awards went to very deserving individuals from the national scene. Also, many drawings for lots of prizes from various vendors, sadly. . . they all missed my card in the barrel. As the headliner at the dinner, we heard from Mark Hall-Patton. He’s the expert on History Channel’s TV show “Pawn Stars”. If you haven’t watched it, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? It is set in a pawn shop in Las Vegas and they have all kinds of people bring in their (at least they think they are) antiquities. Mark wears a red shirt and an Amish hat and sports a long grey beard. He’s quite the expert as he runs 3 museums here in Clark County, Nevada. His story was very entertaining. This was after sitting in on sessions including: Planning “Reasonably Exhaustive” research or a lecture about Google and ALL of it’s search abilities. I hope I can use just a few of the ideas that were proposed to the attendees. By the way, there were 1981 total entered into this conference, and I sat next to Betty from NE Tucson who belongs to Pima County GS. She’s been reading my posts and out of 7-800 people she choose to pick a chair next to me. (Betty, I’ll be talking with you again.) I didn’t have enough strength to post something last night which is why there are two days in today’s post. On Saturday, we knew it was the last day, so we were scouring the days events (all 56 of ’em) just to see what we might be missing out on. I watched the lecture on the Family Tree. I think I made a mistake about trying to be so possessive of my tree. So what would be wrong with letting others latch onto my tree (wherever they would join in to it) & possible adding to it. OR correcting it. Who out there KNOWS that all of their tree info is 100% correct? Darn few, I bet.
Anyway, I will remember everyone I shared a biz. card with, with the personal discussion with a lot of the speakers and with the very friendly vendors. Right there you can get so much info. I have lots of handouts from them and will be sharing their website with all of you over this summer.

Someone asked what NGS was all about. Well, they have been around since 1903 and have been responsible for setting the standards for the Certified Genealogist (CG) and related titles. Belonging to NGS will get you to free education on their website on the avocation of being a genealogist. They are really trying to make sure when you hire someone with their designation, that you will get someone who is Board Certified and knows how to do the research you are asking them to do for you. No more ‘brick walls’ because of their abilities. My hat is off to anyone who holds that (or higher) designation.
Lastly, go check out the website http://www.JustaJoy.com . They are a repository as a “Family Heirloom Exchange”. They have items associated with nearly 50,000 families. It’s like antique hunting on the internet. Some are letters from the civil war and if they belonged to someone in your tree wouldn’t you want that in your collection? Check ’em out.

I’m heading over for the casino buffet right now. See you next Tuesday at the meeting.