JGS of Colorado Annual Seminar - Sunday October 30
Time: 8:00 am to 2:30 pm
Location: JCC, 350 S. Dahlia Street, Denver
Only $5 for members including a catered breakfast, door prizes, and more!

The JGSCO is pleased to present an all-day seminar on Jewish genealogy
featuring David Laskin, NY Times journalist and author of "The Family: A
Journey into the Heart of the Twentieth Century" and also including a
workshop on beginning autobiography with Jean Unger.

Note that this year's programs for the JGSCO follow our theme of "A Year
of Sharing Stories."

If you are new to the JGSCO, this seminar is our biggest event of the
year with a large turnout by members, allowing networking opportunities
about resources, great door prizes, and a lot of fun! Don't miss it for
the reduced price of only $5 per member which includes a catered breakfast.

During the program we will be giving away a number of door prizes that
have been generously donated to us for the seminar. These include items

from Roots Magic, GenealogyBank, Fold3, Newspapers.com, AncesetryDNA,

MyHeritage, Avotaynu, and more!

8:00 Registration and Breakfast
9:00 to 10:15: David Laskin: How and Why I Wrote My Family Story
10:15 to 10:30: Break
10:30 to 11:45: David Laskin: The Research Behind "The Family"
11:45 to 12:45: Lunch - Note that this is a Kosher facility so
please bring your own dairy lunch
12:45 to 1:00: Drawing for door prizes
1:00 to 2:30: Jean Unger: An Introduction to Guided
Autobiography: Bring Your History to Life!
2:30: Conclusion and Farewell

Registration and Cost to attend:
JGSCO Existing Members: $5

Nonmembers may join in advance or at the door. Annual individual
memberships are $30, and $40 per household, and will provide
membership through the 2016-2017 year. Please note that if you
are a nonmember and registering online to join the JGSCO and
attend the seminar, you should register as a nonmember - this will
enable you to join the JGSCO for $30 (or $40 for a family membership)
and not have to pay the additional $5 for the seminar. Go to
jgsco.org to register or to join.

David Laskin: How and Why I Wrote My Family Story

"The Family: A Journey into the Heart of the 20th Century" is the story
of three branches of my mother's family. One branch emigrated to the
U.S. at the end of the 19th century, went into business, and founded
the fabulous Maidenform Bra Company. Another branch went to what was
Palestine in the 1920s, making the desert bloom as idealistic Zionist
pioneers. The third branch remained behind in present-day Belarus and
Lithuania, perishing in the Holocaust.

I am a professional author, writing history that reads like novels,
and I will share how I wove in novelistic detail to bring my family
story to life, while still adhering strictly to the factual record.
Where does "creative nonfiction" cross the line into fiction? How
does one breathe life into seemingly dry data? How does a writer make
ordinary people embody history?

David Laskin: The Research Behind The Family

The second lecture will describe and analyze the genealogical research
that went into the book. I was a total newbie at genealogical research
when I began and it took me some time to work up the nerve to go on
Ancestry.com. On my first foray, I entered "Sam Cohen, Brooklyn, NY",
my maternal grandfather, and Ancestry came up with half a million
matches! I'll start by describing how I learned to navigate Ancestry
and quickly filled in the entire family tree.

Holocaust research proved to be more challenging. Initially, I assumed
I would learn very little about the relatives who perished, but was
surprised by some important discoveries: Working at Yad Vashem and the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum yielded important details, including the
fate of the last European member of my family - a sixteen year old
boy who perished at the slave labor camp Klooga in Estonia. Additional
information was gleaned at the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz in Israel,
which maintains another important archive of Holocaust-related material.

David Laskin Bio
David Laskin was born in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York.
I grew up hearing stories that my immigrant Jewish grandparents told
about the "old country" (Russia) that they left at the turn of the
last century. How I wish I had recorded and video-taped every one of
their memories.

An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated >from Harvard
College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on
to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977.
After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a
freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-
driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in
events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or
genocide. My 2004 book The Children's Blizzard, a national bestseller,
won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers
Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Family was
also won the Washington State Book Award.

I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I
have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
the Seattle Times, the Jewish Daily Forward, Hadassah Magazine,
Jewish in Seattle and Seattle Metropolitan.

Jean Unger: An Introduction to Guided Autobiography: Bring Your History
to Life

This presentation will provide an introduction to Guided Autobiography
classes. Love to write? Struggle to write? It doesn't matter! This
seminar will introduce you to the concept and structure of Guided
Autobiography classes and give you a taste of how it feels to
participate in story-telling in a group setting. If you've ever
wanted to put your stories down on paper and share them, come and see
why this class is for you!

Jean Unger Bio

Jean Suffin Unger is a certified Guided Autobiography facilitator
through the Birren Institute. Her love of writing and hearing stories
led her to seek work helping people reflect on their lives and share
their life stories with others. She is now conducting classes, and
is seeing firsthand the positive impact they are having on people's
lives. Her professional history includes writing for the fitness
industry, working as a medical software trainer, public relations
and veterinary assistant, to name a few. She lives in Erie with her
husband Michael and their dog. A New York transplant, she loves the
Colorado lifestyle.

Terry Lasky
Jewish Genealogical Society of Colorado
more info: jgsco.org