I've arrived in Canada for the OGS Conference

I've arrived in Canada, my tenth visit to the country since 1999, seven of which have been for genealogy events. However, it has been seven years since I was last in Canada (and Ontario), so I am very much looking forward to catching up with folks!

I reached my hotel at Toronto yesterday at midday, after a comfortable flight with Air Transat from Glasgow, although I was not able to check in until 2.30pm. The conference proper has not started yet, although there was an early bird AI workshop organised which had 45 attendees, and which was very well appreciated. Having checked into my room at the hotel and conference venue, which is very close to Toronto Pearson Airport, I soon discovered that we were right under the flight path for planes landing there, and so I spent a good half hour just sitting and watching planes flying over me from my 12th floor window - it's very addictive! (You can certainly hear them coming in, although thankfully it all quietened considerably between 12.00am and 6.00am this morning!)

After a quick evening meal, I had a chance to catch up with Ken McKinlay from BIFHSGO (https://www.bifhsgo.ca), who I last saw seven years ago in Ottawa, and who was recently awarded by the society for his contributions over the years. It was interesting to compare notes with Ken on Canada's pandemic experience, and its impact on the genealogy world, with that in Scotland and the UK, which was very similar indeed with regards to the embrace of Zoom, the impact on traditional meetings and conferences, as well as on the archive and library sector. I was also able to catch up very briefly with Jonny Perl from DNA Painter, local genealogist Marian Press, and Daniel Horowitz from MyHeritage (a former flatmate from a previous OGS conference in St. Catherine's, Toronto, a few years back!).

At 7.30pm I attended a re-enactment of the first ever Burns Supper to be held in Scarborough, Toronto, in 1834. I though this was to be a damatic re-enactment that we would all watch, which it was in a way, but with one minor tweak - the audience was the cast! - and so I ended up playing the part of a Mr Cowan who chaired proceedings! It was good humoured, and whilst pronunciations of Scottish names such as Lesmahagow, Buccleuch, Lanarkshire and Strathaven were definitely lost in translation on this side of the Atlantic (!), it was a very effective way of tuning into the mentality of those colonists/settlers who arrived here in the early 19th century from Scotland, and their reasons for leaving the country in the first place, as well as connections to Burns and Ayrshire itself.

After that it was an early night for a jet-lagged me. Today I'm looking forward to giving a two-hour workshop on Sharing Your Family History Online, before utterly humiliating myself with my lack of general knowledge in a genealogy version of the game show Jeoprady, where I'll be one of the contestants. My jeopardised remains after that will blog an update on today's proceedings tomorrow...

Chris

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