And The Nominees Are ......

It is election season at SCGS. We have three (corrected) three-year board positions open.  Ballots will be mailed to members in November.

Winners will be announced at the SCGS Annual Meeting on December 10th, 2011.

2012 SCGS Nominations

JOAN DEFATO
Joan DeFato was born in Brooklyn, NY, (Coney Island, in fact) and raised on Long Island. After receiving an A.B. in botany from Barnard College and an M.S. in library service from Columbia University, she worked as a librarian in a medical library and a botanical research library before moving to California in 1973 to become the librarian at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia. While at the Arboretum she was asked to borrow a census microfilm from the National Archives for a fellow worker. That was her introduction to genealogy. Although she did little or no research for a number of years, she is back in the hunt now that she is retired. With a mostly Irish ancestry, she is finding more information about her Italians and recently found the marriage of her great grandparents in 1882 in Genzano, Potenza, Italy. In the past she has been a librarian for SCGS and now does proofreading for The Searcher and is on the 2012 Jamboree raffle team.

ALICE FAIRHURST
Alice has been a genealogy researcher for over 40 years. Her areas of specialty outside the United States are Canada and Scotland. A member of the Southern California Genealogy Society, she has served on the Board for three years, is the DNA Interest Chair and the 2012 Jamboree Raffle Chair. She also coordinates the efforts for the International Society of Genetic Genealogy's Y-DNA Haplogroup Tree.  A retiree from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, she served as Career Development and Mentoring Coordinator. She has spoken on managing creativity, organizational development, personality styles, career management and learning styles at conventions in various sites in the United States, Canada and Britain.

PAULA HINKEL
Within two hours of firing up an Ancestry.com fourteen-day trial, Paula Hinkel traced her paternal grandmother's family to medieval France, chevaliers and the Keeper of the King's Bread. The discoveries, while unproven and undocumented, were enough to ignite genealogy fever. She fortunately recognized the need to learn "the right way" and joined the Southern California Genealogical Society. Paula's professional experience includes marketing research, computer application usage, writing, and project management. She brings a unique set of skills to her roles as vice-president of SCGS and co-chair of the Society's annual conference, the successful and popular Southern California Genealogy Jamboree. Paula is a self-described technology instigator and helped implement many of the Society's technological advances. Her volunteer responsibilities at SCGS include:
·Vice President 2004-2005, 2008-2011
·President 2006
·Co-Chair of SCGS Jamboree 2006-2011
·Website designer and editor
·The Searcher (quarterly journal) contributor
·Marketing, Publicity and Promotion, Blog and Social Media Editor

She has photographed and transcribed over 15,000 headstones for the Findagrave.com website, researched the historic Los Angeles City Cemetery, developed a website to assist researchers in finding obituaries in Los Angeles County, and researched Civil War veteran burials in area cemeteries. Paula graduated with a BA in Business Administration from Briar Cliff College (Sioux City, Iowa) as a non-traditional student.

JOYCE ROBERSON
An employee of Pierce College for thirty-one years, she retired as the Assistant to the Vice-President of Academic Affairs. Always having a strong interest in writing, she joined the SCGS Writers Group and in 2011 was awarded first place in Category 2 in the GENII Writer's contest. Her essay Reprise was printed in the Summer 2011 The Searcher which was distributed to all participants at the 2011 Jamboree.

Joyce's lifelong interest in genealogy became an avid passion in 1995, when on a vacation trip back east she met her husband's cousins for the first time. They filled her in on the family back to 1800. She took the ball and ran with it, taking almost every line back to the late 1500s over time. She continues her work, fleshing out each precious ancestor's life with loving dedication.

She is a member of the SCGS Jamboree Planning Committee and a proofreader for The Searcher. She will be working on the Volunteer Recruitment Committee for the 2012 Jamboree.