2021 Conference Speaker Profiles

Join Alex as he takes you on a genealogical guided tour of the historic City of York. With eyes and boots on the ground, he will be delving into his ancestry and will explore just how to utilise everything a city has to offer for genealogists.

Bob Coret

Else Churchill is the Genealogist at the Society of Genealogists (SoG) in London and a member of the Lords Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Records and Archives. She has over 30 years of experience as a genealogist.

Formerly a professional genealogical librarian and researcher, Else has worked for the SoG since 1994. She now leads on external liaison, representation and communications; the Society's education and publishing programmes as well as being the Society's subject specialist.

Else will discuss the online digital collections of the Society of Genealogists Library at the conference. In addition to providing a library and research facility for family history, the Society holds some unique records and archives. While not a public archive per se the SoG is often an archive of last resort, providing a home for records that might otherwise have been destroyed. Many of the SoG's digital collections are produced as a result of volunteer projects, which have been powering away at home during lockdown.

Lee Oliver has worked at The National Archives (TNA), and its predecessor, the Public Record Office, for over 30 years. Fulfilling a variety of roles at Kew, Chancery Lane, and the Family Records Centre, the common thread has been services to archive users. Lee has been involved in delivering, managing, and developing, reading room services for most of his career. Notable highlights include the introduction of bring-your-own digital cameras, the deployment at scale of computers in reading rooms for research and access to digitised archival material, and several large redesigns of the reading rooms. More recently, attention has been focussed on providing support and facilities to encourage a broader spectrum of visitors to TNA, and in April this year, Lee was appointed the first Head of Visitor Experience for TNA. For the last 15 months, Lee has been a member of TNA’s COVID Response Group, responsible for ensuring that a COVID-Secure environment is achieved and maintained for staff and visitors.

Lee will talk to us about "Providing access to archives during lockdown", or to put it another way, "the trials and tribulations of delivering an archive service during a global pandemic". This presentation will highlight the challenges The National Archives has faced in attempting to maintain a service to archive users during the most unprecedented of times, and illustrate that access to archives is now far more than just opening the reading rooms.

Dr Nick Barratt is an author, broadcaster and historian best known for his work on BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? He is the Director of Learner and Discovery Services at the Open University, a teaching fellow at the University of Dundee and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is currently the President of the Family History Federation, sits on the Executive Committee of the Community Archives and Heritage Group and is part of the Midlands 4 Cities Doctoral Training Partnership Advisory Group. You can find out more about Nick and his research services here: www.sticks.org.uk.

Free UK Genealogy Chair of Trustees, Richard has a background in cultural heritage information systems (primarily museums), markup languages and Linked Data.

Richard will give an overview of genealogical file formats in his presentation: "Making Open Data a reality: file formats for exchange of genealogical data".