Society Saturday: It's Spring Seminar Time!

Geneabloggers suggested a new Saturday blog topic this week--Society Saturday--so I thought I'd use it.

I've been a very active member of the Seattle Genealogical Society for a number of years and am constantly amazed at how many local genealogists are NOT members of the Society. Many of them use our library and come to programs [often without paying the user fee] and attend our seminars. I have to admit that this is one of my pet peeves.

Maintaining a library is an expensive undertaking, especially in a metropolitan area. The SGS library contains some unique materials, especially in our family histories section and archives. Sometimes it seems like all the SGS Board does is try to figure out ways of generating more funds to support our library operations and of finding more volunteers. We keep our library open 30 hours each week with an all-volunteer staff. Personally, I think that's pretty amazing and worthy of more support from the local genealogy community.

And yes, SGS [like many societies] sponsors an annual Spring seminar. We bring in a nationally known genealogist each Spring and this year we are absolutely thrilled to have Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, coming to speak in a traditional all-day seminar on May 18th. Judy will also be doing a 2-hour advanced workshop on May 19th for a limited number of SGS members. This is the first time we've added a workshop presentation for our nationally known speaker and I'm anxious to see how this works out. Since registration for the Sunday workshop is limited to SGS members, will we get a sudden influx of new members? Time will tell.