Saturday, November 17, 2007

CGSSD Meeting today

The Computer Genealogy Society of San Diego (CGSSD) meeting was this morning at 9 a.m. on the UCSD campus. There are usually two sessions at this meeting. Today, they were -

1) I attended the FamilyTreeMaker User Group, led by Lance Dohe. Note that there were user groups for Legacy and RootsMagic also at this time. There were about 16 attendees, and only two of them had obtained FTM 2008 and tried to use it. Lance had uploaded a GEDCOM file earlier but said that he had not used it much. Since this was the first meeting since FTM 2008 was released, Lance demonstrated some basic things - the Plan tab, Person tab, the Places tab, the Media tab, etc. He played with the name index a bit, noting that the spouse's name was no longer on the name index page.

The maps on the Places page are from Microsoft Virtual Earth and were fairly impressive. Of course, the place name in the database needs to match the place name in the Virtual Earth database. The first place Lance tried to demonstrate - an Orchard Place in Chicago IL (now under O'Hare Airport runways, apparently) - did not show up; the program did find an Orchard Place in Fort Collins CO, however!

In the Media tab, Lance clicked on each type of media and noted that the Report options did not yet include the traditional genealogy reports, but did include the AncestryPress type book. I shared that there was an AncestryPress Webinar and an FTM 2008 Webinar available for those who want to see a presentation about those subjects.

2) The CGSSD business meeting followed at 10:30 a.m, with about 45 people in attendance. CGSSD President John Kracha reviewed the present state of the society, and had each Board member summarize their area. The most impressive statistic was that CGSSD has increased from 202 members to 233 members this year. The Society made a significant profit in the past year, mainly due to the new members and the Dick Eastman seminar back in May, co-sponsored with the San Diego Genealogical Society.

Elections were held, but there was no candidate for the President position. Linda Hervig (VP-Administration), Dale Nesbit (VP-Membership), Barbara Cogburn (Secretary) and Louise Giulbault (Treasurer) were re-elected to one-year terms for their current positions. John Kracha will take the open Program Chairman position.

Then it was time for member sharing. John Kracha showed photos from his trip to the Midwest (WI, IL, IN) and the South (KY, VA, FL), including the Allen County Public Library. He and his wife visited relatives in each location and had a wonderful time talking about family history. Ed Hasselmann presented the results of the survey he took about computer backups back in the summer. I may post a summary of his results, or a link to them if he puts them on the Internet. Jerry Oen told about creating a Norwegian Genealogy Group which meets monthly at the San Diego FHC. Lastly, they held a drawing and my ticket was the first one picked - I selected a nice poinsettia plant. My wise-ass remark just before the drawing that "the winner should be named President" went unheard, thankfully.

After the meeting a light brunch was served and the attendees sat and stood in groups talking to each other.

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