This Sunday, July 16, 2006, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles
is hosting a meeting >from 1:30PM - 4:00PM at the Santa Monica Public
Library:

"The Whole Mishpocha:
Writing Family Newsletters and Planning Family Reunions"

You’ve spent years researching your family tree, pursuing elusive relatives
and sending out detailed family histories in countless e-mails. Isn’t it
time to share the fruits of your genealogical research in a more organized
and productive fashion by writing a family newsletter or coordinating a
reunion? Reunions are wonderful events to show off your research and share
old photographs and family tree charts. Connecting with relatives you’ve
never met before is a fringe benefit. Newsletters help to continue those
relationships by soliciting new information that gets circulated to your
extended family.

JGSLA members Joan Glanz Rimmon and Lori Miller will share their expertise
in making your hard work pay off by explaining the best ways to embark on
these ambitious, but rewarding projects.

Joan Glanz Rimmon will explain how to get started in publishing a family
newsletter, and how to decide who and what to put into it. She will show you
how a one-page typewritten letter to a few cousins in 1987 grew into a
website and her latest publication of eight pages with photos and stories,
which elicited raves >from her cousins on an address list of over 900. Joan
began her genealogical career in 1986 during a period of empty-nest
syndrome. Her family’s six generations in America were unknown before she
began researching her maternal lines and discovering her
great-great-grandmother’s grave in Baltimore. With such a long history in
the U.S., it was not difficult to track down relatives. Her friends say,
“She opens cupboards, and relatives fall out!” Joan’s research has not been
limited to America, and she has shlepped her husband, Sinclair, all over the
world tracking down cousins.

Lori Miller became interested in her family genealogy more than 15 years ago
while interviewing her then 94 year old great aunt. Since that time she has
traveled to Argentina, Ukraine and Canada to meet family members she has
discovered. Her experience working in support of JewishGen for over eight
years, and teaching classes and giving talks on behalf of JGSLA, prepared
her for the nest step: a family reunion. Lori was inspired by a photo she
found – dated 1906 – which showed five family members and a poem, inscribed
in Russian, which said, in part, “When I am dead and gone…you remember me.”
To that aim, in 2002 she organized 145 family members who joined together in
Los Angeles to remember their aunts and uncles and thus their family
heritage. Lori will tell us how she organized the reunion and incorporated
her family history research into the event.

*Note: If you would like to bring examples of printed family trees, photo
displays, charts, newsletters and reunion photo albums to share on a display
table at the meeting, please do so. We will leave time before and after the
program to look over these examples and get hints and tips >from other
members with experience in these areas.

Location: Santa Monica Public Library, Martin Luther King Auditorium, 601
Santa Monica Blvd. (between 5th and 6th Streets), Santa Monica, CA 90401.
(310) 458-8600

For more meeting information and directions go to our website:

http://www.jewishgen.org/jgsla/Meeting%20Pages/Jul_16_2006_Mtg.htm

This meeting is free of charge to all.

Pamela Weisberger
Program Chair, JGSLA
Santa Monica, CA
pweisberger@...