ROOTS & BRANCHES

What’s a “Hep Cat?”

That was the questions posed in comments on my Facebook feed after the Ohio Genealogical Society conference dubbed as such in promoting its upcoming annual event, which has been a consistent spring gathering for decades.

Truthfully, I was a little late to the party, only becoming a speaker for the first time in 2010—although OGS has made up for that by putting me on the program every year but one since then.

And along the way, I guess you could say I developed a “following,” That only was brought home to me in 2022, when OGS was the first “return to in-person” conference I attended since the COVID-19 pandemic.

While I was still in the parking lot, a registrant came up to me with a question about Pennsylvania birth records. In the lobby of the exhibit hall, a second registrant waved at me as I was hand-trucking booth supplies and told me she’d be stopping by my booth with a German-language record to read.

This year’s edition of OGS, titled “Rockin’ Around Your Family Tree,” will run from Wednesday to Saturday, April 10–13 at the Kalahari Resort and Convention Center, 7000 Kalahari Drive, Sandusky, Ohio.

For “Featured Speakers,” the event will have Sunny McClellan Morton as the opening keynote speaker on “Rocking the Relatively Recent Relatives;” Michael D. Lacopo, Daniel Horowitz, and your “Roots & Branches” columnist.

There will be close to a hundred topics presented during the three main days of the conference (Thursday to Saturday), which is preceded by an afternoon of workshops (on Wednesday) with topics ranging from DNA to Germans to several “society enhancement” sessions.

In addition to the speakers, there’ll be an exhibit hall and special events such as inductions into the OGS-sponsored lineage societies and a trivia game on the Friday night of the conference.

Helping sponsor the OGS conference is MyHeritage.com, in the top category of “Hound Dog.” Other sponsors include the Archives of Michigan, the Board for Certification of Genealogists Education Fund, Polish Genealogical Society Greater Cleveland,  East Cuyahoga Genealogical Society, Firelands Genealogical Society, and many of OGS’s county chapter societies.

Kalahari Resorts Sandusky bills itself as Ohio’s largest indoor waterpark, a unique all-under-one-roof experience that combines wet and wild fun with world-class dining, a luxurious spa, live entertainment, diverse shopping experiences, a huge game room, Safari Outdoor Adventure Park and a state-of-the-art convention center.

By the way, apparently a “hep cat” is “a stylish or fashionable person, especially in the sphere of jazz or popular music.”

Those who attend OGS can judge on how hep a cat I really am.

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You’ll find all the rest of the information about the Ohio conference on its website at the URL, https://www.ogs.org/2024-conference/