Sunday, July 16, 2006, 1:30 p.m. at the Santa Monica Public Library (for directions)
(Guests are welcome. $5 fee for guests is waived.)

Program: The Whole Mishpocha: Writing Family Newsletters and Planning Family Reunions (handout)

Speakers: Joan Glanz Rimmon and Lori Miller

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.

Food: Come to Santa Monica early and have a bite at the Bookmark Café, located in the Main Library’s landscaped central courtyard. Opening at 11:30 A.M., it features salads, sandwiches, wraps, breakfast items, soft drinks, smoothies, teas and coffees. (310) 587-2665.

LOCATION: Santa Monica Public Library, Martin Luther King Auditorium, 601 Santa Monica Blvd. (between 6th and 7th Streets), Santa Monica, CA 90401. (310) 458-8600 Take the Santa Monica Fwy. West, exit on Lincoln, go right (North) on Lincoln three blocks, turn left on Santa Monica Blvd. The Library will be two blocks on your right. The parking garage is entered on 7th Street between Wilshire and Arizona. Library garage parking is $1.00 per hour (bring change). Metered street parking is also available.