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JGSGB General Meeting - Aug 9th 2020 2pm – with Bernard Miller – “Geni.com; The Good, The Bad and The Utterly Ghastly”

After the excitement of the Limmud and The Together Plan conferences on 2nd Aug, our next meeting in the JGSGB Virtual Meeting Programme is a General Meeting by Zoom.

Date: August 9th 2020
Time: 14:00 London
Title: “Geni.com; The Good, The Bad and The Utterly Ghastly”
Speaker: Bernard Miller

Description: When Bernard Miller spoke on 12 July about some of the remarkable family stories that had emerged from his volunteering to be a guide at the Anne Frank exhibition last year, he mentioned his use of geni.com. Geni.com is the Marmite of genealogy programmes. Several members had questions about how he uses it, some talked of their bad experiences. Bernard has spent more years than he cares to remember involved in research, including periods at the UN and the UK Parliament and the European Parliament and finds it a valuable tool which he uses and hates, but not as much as he hates some of the other genealogy programmes, one in particular. He has offered to speak about how he uses geni.com, what it is good for, what it is bad for, what he likes and dislikes and how he attempts to avoid or work around some of its downsides. He will illustrate this with some hopefully amusing (and possibly some distressing) examples and hopes that it will encourage debate within the group. If you want to find out about or have information to share on Geni.com, The Good, The Bad and The Utterly Ghastly, join this Zoom meeting.

About Bernard Miller

Bernard Miller was born in The City, grew up and has been based in North London for most of his life in England. He lived over thirty years in a dozen other countries, worked in many more and is fluent in several languages. Originally trained in architecture, planning and economics, most of his life has been devoted to research.

His mother’s family was Sephardic, his father’s Ashkenazi but there was little talk of them or their history. Not until three weeks before his mother’s death in 1977 did she even speak about close family she had lost in the Holocaust, leaving no time for questioning or investigation.

His interest in genealogy, although he didn’t know it was that then, was triggered by a his grandfather’s cousin who, in the 1960s mentioned an ancestor, one of the Dutch Burghers who came to petition Oliver Cromwell to ‘readmit’ the Jews, a saga he decided to follow up in the 1990s when internet searching became available. That led to discovering some amazing stories.

Since then his interest in his family history and genealogy more broadly has flourished. At his first JGSGB meetings less than two years ago, he met long-lost friends and unsuspected (and unsuspecting) blood cousins and relatives by marriage.

As some of you may know, Bernard has not been in the best of health recently, but we have been delighted to see him join our JGSGB Zooms from his bed or his hospital room, although we prefer when he joins from his study. In the unlikely event that Bernard cannot present on the day, I will step in with a rendition of “Polish Ancestral Tourism – Wolf Hunting in Womja” and Bernard will speak at a later date.

The invitation to register is below, but please keep it to yourself! Please note that we are continuing with registration for our Zoom meetings in August to see if the automated emails generated are better than manually sending out Zoom invitations.

If you have problems joining please email chairman@jgsgb.org.uk, preferably in the 15 minutes before the meeting proper starts.

========================================================

Leigh Dworkin is inviting you to register for a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: JGSGB General Meeting: "Geni.com. The Good, The Bad, and The Utterly Ghastly" - by Bernard Miller

When: Aug 9, 2020 02:00 PM London

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZckduqtpj4sGNeoPwoekE4Wf9NsyDRcesqJ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. ========================================================

Leigh Dworkin

Chairman, JGSGB







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