Unlock The Past Genealogy Cruise: February 2013 - Mon, 19 Mar 2012

I am going to be a presenter on a genealogy cruise in February 2013. This one is offered by Unlock the Past, a company that services the genealogy community in Australia and New Zealand.

This will be the 3rd genealogy cruise Unlock the Past has sponsored. Previous cruises were March 2011 and November 2011 so the company has some experience in putting them on.

Their upcoming cruise will be from February 10 to 19, 2013. It leaves from Sydney Australia and has stops in New Caledonia and Fiji before returning to Sydney. It’s on the Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas, which was the largest cruise ship in the world when it was commissioned in 1999. Cost for the conference/cruise is $1499 and they are now open for bookings. From the sound of it, they are expecting maybe 300 to 400 genealogists to attend.

I have given them a list of 24 topics I could talk about. They’ll select a half dozen or so that I’ll then present, plus I may also give some workshops on Behold, GenSoftReviews, or other aspects of genealogy (e.g. GEDCOM, organizing your source material, source-based genealogy, or life-events) that I believe genealogists should learn about or at least be aware of. This particular ship has a 320 seat conference room assigned to our conference that can be divided into 4 rooms, allowing concurrent programming.

There will be excellent presenters there. Some of those included in the list are Jill Ball / Geniaus who I briefly met at RootsTech, Dan Lynch who I would have liked to meet at RootsTech (there were 3,400 people and I couldn’t meet everyone), Jan Gow who I had some wonderful conversations with at RootsTech, who recently won the Queen’s Service Metal for her genealogy work in New Zealand and was also one of the Behold users I met. Then recently announced was Bob Velke, author of the program The Master Genealogist who I’m really looking forward to meeting. In total, there will be about 100 presentations, so this is going to be a significant genealogy event.

I’m looking forward to again seeing some Behold users out there. I know many of you are from Australia, and some live in Sydney. Even if you can’t make the cruise, my wife and I will be spending at least a week prior to or after the cruise in or around Sydney, and I’d love to get together with you. So I’m giving you lots of advance notice (11 months) to make plans.