London and Middlesex Branch – “Cyrus by any other spelling was a – Syrus, Zyrus, C., S. or a Z. The search for my great-grandfather’s roots in Ontario”

A bit about our Speaker:

A Manitoba Genealogical Society (MGS) member since 1996, Gordon has been active with the MGS SE & Winnipeg Branch. He presented programs over 40 times to the branch as well as sessions at the Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Minnesota annual conferences. Gordon, a past president, served as VP Information Technology at MGS from 2011 to 2017. Before that (1998 on) he was computer Chairman. He has worked to upgrade the MGS computer systems and was the architect and developer of the MGS MANI online database project since its inception. MANI (MAnitoba Name Index) has grown to over 1,500,000 index records to Manitoba names found in various publications and cemetery transcriptions. Gordon McBean is a retired Educational Technologist from Red River College. He supported college staff’s use of classroom technology and ran training courses for staff on Microsoft Office, web creation tools and other technologies used in the educational environment. As a teen, Gordon was recouping from an operation when his mother got him started doing genealogy. When Gordon first got a Personal Computer, he transferred that information into software on the computer. Sometime in the 1990’s he was cleaning out his mother’s basement and came across a cache of old photographs that were from his father’s side of the family. Unfortunately, most of the pictures did not name the people in them. He wanted to assign a name to every face in the photos and thus entered into the dark, never ending black hole known as “genealogical research” seriously. Gordon later discovered a large box of negatives, definitely no name written there. He then entered into the world of online genealogy and crowdsourcing in an attempt to identify those people. Gordon has spent his life in technology. He was the kid who could get the 16mm projector working in elementary and by junior high he was the “go to guy” for the school’s closed circuit television system, the first in Manitoba. He chose a career in Theatre and Broadcasting and worked in both of those fields before getting involved in educational technology in 1972. He worked for 40 years helping college instructors prepare classroom material. At Red River College he created the Teaching Learning Technology Centre to support and train instructors in the use of technology ranging from personal computers to putting their courses online. In addition to audio and video creation, Gordon is an avid photographer. When not involved in these activities and of course genealogy, Gordon loves to cross country ski, cycle, canoe and travel overseas with his wife. They also travel in their RV around North America, with much genealogy and cemetery visiting! He has also been involved with the Scottish cultural community having been active in organizing the yearly Folklorama Pavilion of Scotland and serving on the board of the clan MacBean International Inc. His areas of expertise are in digital photography, digital audio, computer technology and genealogy research. He created and maintains several web sites, including http://glmcbean.myheritage.com and several WordPress and Facebook sites

Synopsis:

Link to register (virtual): https://bit.ly/LMOA-May2024

Once registered, a confirmation email will be sent with the meeting details.