Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference 2011

The annual Federation of Genealogical Societies conference was held from September 7th-10th at the Prairie Capital Convention Center in Springfield, Illinois. The conference was a terrific event featuring a generous list of exhibitors of all kinds and provided DOZENS of presentations from highly respected people in the genealogy community DAILY.

If you missed the conference this is one that I will highly recommend attending in the future if you’re able. Booths for FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, Achives.com and many, many other businesses and organizations were equipped with great personnel to answer questions. I met lots of people, visited a lot of booths and attended some of the many speakers that delivered a wealth of great information. The conference was well worth the trip and I’m thankful that I attended.

One of the greatest contributions that I brought home was the USB flash drive included in my welcome packet that contains the syllabus for every presentation at the conference. The conference syllabus is over 500 pages (PDF format) of material covering every session. Not only do I have my personal notes from the sessions that I was able to attend but I have the outlines, references, website links and many of the tables and illustrations from all of the sessions. There were at least five other sessions that I would have loved to attend but could not – but on the flash drive I have the syllabus from the ones I missed, and each contains a terrific amount of material. Audio files recorded for most of the presentations are also available to be ordered online. See www.fgs.org for details.