Mar 302012
I’ll review Day Three a bit later but for now let’s jump straight to the night of revelry that was the Conference Dinner.
Around 240 happy genealogists attended the Conference Dinner held at the Convention Centre. After making our way past the very young looking students, in terribly high heels, who were attending their Year 12 Forma,l we made our way to our area. The Centre must be well soundproofed as I never heard a sound from the other event.
The main sponsor of the evening was the New South Wales Justice Department who have since inception registered over 18 million events. Surely some of our missing people must be in there somewhere?
To whet your appetites the Appetiser was a Continental antipasto platter which contained some very nice pate, roast pork, olives, sun dried tomatoes and two types of sausage. The Main was a herb crust chicken roulade with fresh asparagus and saffron cream sauce followed by a selection of mini desserts.
I am not a wine drinker but there were bottles of Tolley Elite Chardonnay Adelaide Hills 2011 and Krondorf Shiraz Barossa Valley 2010 as well as soft drinks, orange juice and mineral water.
We were well entertained by a demonstration of bush dancing and then some brave souls from the audience joined in, including our own Geneablogger, Seonaid Lewis from Auckland, Robyn Williams also from New Zealand, Lesley Silvester and another five brave participants. A great job they did too!!
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| Bush Dancers |
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| Seonaid Lewis strutting her stuff! |
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| Lesley Silvester dancing the night away |
Then we had the AFFHO Meritorious Service Award for Family History which was awarded to June Penny,from Canberra, a most deserving recipient.
There was no announcement of where the 15th Congress will be held, perhaps that will be announced tomorrow at the closing ceremony.
We were ably entertained over a selection of desserts by Dan Poffenberger first with his rendition of the Jim Reeves song “He’ll Have to Go’ and then with his ‘Twenty Shocking Lessons of Old English Life You’ve probably Never Learned Before’
These included such things as names with Sarah Porch as she was found on the porch, Thomas Barn found in or near a barn, William the son of Anne by God Knows Who?
appropriate or maybe not so appropriate occupational names such as a surgeon named Mr Killer, who would perhaps not be my first choice of doctor!
Dan had found some wonderful examples of direct descriptions in the parish registers: an ugly woman over 40, people who were buried in pieces, the two duelling men who killed each other and whom the king decreed should be buried together for eternity. There was also the not so artistic clerk who decided for some unknown reason to draw a mermaid in the register! And many more wonderful examples.
Dan made a great dinner presentation which was appreciated by all.
The evening was ably tweeted by table 18 which contained Shauna Hicks, Seonaid Lewis and Jill Ball. I was a lone voice on table 21 and a number of my tweets disappeared into the ether.
A good time was had by all. Now off to sleep to be ready for day Four and the final day of the conference.
2 Responses to “AFFHO 2012 Congress Dinner”
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Sounds like it's been a fun conference Helen with some interesting talks and displays. We heard Dan Poffenberger here last weeken and I could see him being an entertaining dinner speaker…never an easy task. he's very knowledgeable.
He is an excellent speaker. Lots of fun was had by all.