FGS Conference - Thursday

The Mayor of Springfield welcomed FGS Conference attendees to Springfield.  The Keynote speech was given by the Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero.  The conference statistics were shared.  2,000 attendees from 48 states (including Alaska and Hawaii) and five countries.

The Conference is held at the Prairie Capital Convention Center, right next door to our hotel (boy, how convenient is that!)

The Exhibit Hall opened at 10 AM sharp.  We had an hour to shop and drop our door prize tickets into vendors door prize boxes before heading off to sessions at 11 AM.  What a scramble!  Had to go back to several vendors later in the day.

I snagged a ticket for the Illinois State Genealogical Society Luncheon.  Great food and speaker at lunch time.  The afternoon had me pulling Room Monitor duty for one of the sessions.  Not a bad gig.

The Exhibit Hall was open until 8 PM.  FamilySearch handed out large cookies and bottled water.  As she walked from booth to booth calling out door prize winners, Patricia Oxley, Exhibits Chair, had a line of potential winners following her all around the exhibit hall.  Really funny to watch.  Great fun!

FGS Conference - Wednesday

I'm Ventura County Genealogical Society's FGS delegate.  3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, September 6th is when onsite registration opened. This is where pre-registered folks picked up their tote bag filled with things and receive an envelope with tickets, nametag, etc.  In that tote bag was the full syllabus on a flash drive.

Wednesday, I attended the Focus on Societies sessions at the Prairie Capital Convention Center in downtown Springfield, IL.  Each session was one hour with half-hour between sessions.

The Plenary Session speaker was David E. Rencher, AG, CG, FIGRS, FUGA.  His speech was How Will Our Society Survive?  Do We Alter, Mutate, Modify, Shift or Switch?  Wish I could take his PowerPoint slides back to my society, it was powerful!

I attended the following sessions:

Delegate 101

21^st Century  Marketing Techniques for Genealogist/Genealogical Societies

FGS Luncheon, speaker: Ransom H. Love. 

Speech: Community Connection: Why Record Custodians Need to Be Working on a Global Basis

I volunteered to be the Room Monitor to this session:

Publicity for Society Events: Simply Supercharged

Brainstorming Session: Social Media

Brainstorming Session: Marketing Your Society

All sessions I chose were informative and awesome.  I met other bloggers and society delegates from across the country.  Wow, what a day.  Can't wait until the Exhibit Hall opens today!

FGS Conference Road Trip - Day 7

Since the Gateway ARCH in St Louis wasn't a whole day event, we packed up the car and drove about 1 1/2 hours to Springfield, IL our final destination this leg of our trip. When I booked our hotel several months ago I had no idea we'd be four days early.  My conference wasn't starting until Wednesday, Sept 7th and I had us checking in on Tuesday, Sept 6th.  But today was Friday, Sept. 2nd, I was concerned that with the Labor Day holiday the hotels would fill up and we'd be stuck trying to find something close.  When we got into town about 2:00 p.m. that day we were able to check-in right away.  Whew, you just never know.  So we have our room for the next nine days until we check-out Sunday, Sept. 11th.

We don't usually stay in a downtown hotel so my husband was really surprised that since we were here through the weekend the whole downtown "rolled up their sidewalk" so early.  Not much to do and the restaurants were far and in between.  What was open on Saturday was the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum which we wanted to see.  Since most of the historical sites in the downtown area were in walking distance to each other, we got some much needed exercised.

In the other Presidential Museums we visited, we had to turn off the flash on our cameras but could still take our own photos.  Not at the Lincoln Museum.  Any kind of photography was prohibited except in a few areas.  So we don't have the usual blitz of photos.  I did buy some very nice post cards but those will have to only be in the scrapbook I'll someday put together.

 

Museum Gallery


The Museum was interactive and awesome!  So very different from the other four we've been to in the last month (Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower & Truman).  I love history and love reading about it.  Here, I was able to see the real documents that changed our HISTORY.  This trip was so worth the 2100 miles we've done in six days.

FGS Conference Road Trip - Day 6

We woke up early, got dressed, had a nice breakfast in the hotel.  Walked over to the Gateway ARCH.  It was sunny, warming up to be about 100 degrees.  I was watching my husband enjoying being here.  In 1989, we took a family road trip to Chicago with our two girls.  We drove right by the ARCH and said one day we'll have to stop.  Today was that day.

The sheer size of this monument is so awesome.  We've watch documentaries of how and why the ARCH was built but being at its base and looking straight up and then following the seamless structure to the other side of the park was just amazing to us.

We bought our tickets for the four minute ride up in a five passenger pod.  The only window was on the tiny door and all you could see was where they welded the sections together.  Luckily there was only another couple in our pod.  We got to know a little about them on the way up.  We exchanged cameras so we could have a photo of us on our own camera, we did the same for them. 

Curved floor & ceiling

After climbing out of the pod and up the stairs to the ARCH floor, I was a little dizzy.  Had to hold onto one of the walls.  It was almost like being in a carnival fun house, until you get used to the floor and ceiling being curved.   Hubby started snapping pictures like crazy. 

It isn't often you get the view we got that day.  On one side we looked out the windows and watched the Mississippi River.  On the other side we saw the city of St Louis and an extra bonus of the shadow of the ARCH overlay.  What a site!

FGS Conference Road Trip - Day 5



Harry S. Truman Museum


What a great day we had today.  We only drove about 1 1/2 hours to visit the Harry S. Truman Museum in Independence, MO.  No rain insight but the temputure hovered around 100 degrees.  Almost sorry we didn't see the Truman Musuem before we saw the Eisenhower one.  Both were great, full of history and probably because of the time of year we visited, not crowed at all.  The staff was friendly and very helpful.

What really struck us were all the authenic documents and artifacts that were on display.  We were able to view and see the real thing right there in Missouri.  When a President leaves office, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) establishes a Presidential project until a new Presidential library is built and transferred to the Government.  These are not traditional libraries, but rather repositories for preserving and making accessible the papers, records, and other historical materials of U.S. Presidents.

We spent about 3 hours touring the museum.  After we had some lunch we drove straight through to St. Louis.  Called a hotel in advance to secure a room for the night, so glad we did.  We'll visit the St. Louis Arch in the morning.