What a fantastic experience I had during my first NGS Family History Conference in May 2011 in Charleston, South Carolina. I arrived midday on Wednesday and from the moment I checked in and received my credentials until the final session on Saturday afternoon, it was one of the most informative and rewarding multi-day genealogical conferences I have ever attended.
One of the first decisions I was glad I’d made when registering online was to order a hardcopy syllabus. Being a traditional hardcopy book-lover, I was thrilled to receive the large bound volume containing all of the syllabus materials for every session offered. What a wealth of genealogical resource information it has been since I returned home.
Attending the annual NGS conference is challenging because you have such a vast selection of wonderfully informative sessions and great speakers to choose from that it puts your decision-making ability to the test. For me, there was never a single hour during each day’s schedule of presentations that there weren’t at least two or more sessions that I wanted to hear in person. The good news is that even though you can only attend one presentation, you can order CDs of nearly all the sessions while you’re at the conference or even once you have gone home.
The exhibit hall was one of the first places I visited when I had a break in the schedule of talks, and I returned to the exhibit area several times during the four days of the conference, further augmenting my own home reference library of published genealogical books and materials. I also got the chance to meet some of the booksellers and wonderful NGS headquarters staff members I’d been doing business with long-distance for several years but had never had the pleasure of getting to meet face-to-face.
The most meaningful and memorable part of attending the NGS conference was getting to hear several excellent genealogical speakers on a variety of different topics relating to genealogy research and family-history writing. That conference and the upcoming one in Cincinnati are packed full of numerous people who are extremely knowledgeable and do a great job in presenting the material they have mastered.
Finally, going to the NGS conference in Charleston gave me the impetus to visit a number of places in and around the Charleston region of our country that I’d been wanting to visit for many years. One of the most memorable was the Andersonville National Historic Site, the home of the National POW (Prisoner-of-War) Museum, which is well worth the time and effort to go visit.
If you’re trying to decide whether or not to attend the NGS Conference in Cincinnati in May 2012, I encourage you to do it and see for yourself if what I’ve said isn’t also true for you. The conference will be fantastic, you will be overwhelmed with the amount of new information and insights you will gather, and you’ll be in the Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky region and find lots of great places and historical sites to visit during your travels to and from the conference. I’ll plan to see you in Cincinnati in May.
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