The slides and meeting minutes from the March 25, 2023 have been posted in the Member Section of the website for access by our members.  Please select the Research Downloads menue option after logging into the website for the files.

Please see our Events page for registration information for a summary of our 2022 activities and plans for the future including our July conference.  We hope you can attend online via Zoom on 3/25/2023..

We will be posting the July 2023 registration information on the OGSA Store pages in March.  You will be able to register and pay for the conference online or by sending in a registration form that will be posted there.  There will be options for in-person and online attendance.  We plan to record the sessions and all registrants will be able to view the recordings for some time after the sessions have been completed.

Please watch our Events page for details on our July, 2023 conference.  New details will be added as planning progresses.

We are planning our first onsite conference since COVID hit and have reserved the Minnesota Genealogical Society (MGS) Library in Mendota Heights, Minnesota for July 28-29, 2023.  This location is close to the airport, hotels, the Mall of America and where we maintain our research materials.  Seating will be more limited than at the hotels in the past but we plan to record the sessions to allow both onsite and online attendance.  We will provide more details in the near future.

Lin Strong, OGSA President, will be presenting an online session on European Christmas Markets on November 17, 2022 at 7:00 PM Central Time, ending around 8:30 PM or when all of the questions and comments are finished.  Please join us for this event, ask questions, share experiences or just enjoy the tour.

 

Please see our Events page for registration information.

Members with membership expiration dates of 12/31/2022 will now see an alert noting the expiration date when you log into the system.  You can select the "Profile" menu to see a link to renew your membership online for one to three years. Payments can be made online or you can have the system create an order form that you can print if you would prefer to send a check to our office.  Just select the payment option you prefer and the process is pretty easy to complete.   

 

We have had some questions about the PayPal/Credit Card payment option.  We process credit cards through PayPal so an account is not needed there for card payments. 

 

We are cancelling the old PayPal autopays since the new system eliminates many manual record keeping steps.  It was also easy to create an extra autopay record and we needed to closely watch the receipts coming in, note the renewals, and process many duplicate payment refunds.  The new system helps to avoid these issues.  

 

Please contact us at Memberships@ogsa.us if you want to change your membership type for mailed or online journals.  We need to make that change for you prior to your renewal.  

 

We hope that you will find the process very easy.  Thank you for your membership support.

We like to get the new year's membership list updated by the time the January journal is issued and you will be notified of the renewal date soon.  About November 1, an email will be sent to everyone with an email address on file with a notice to renew your membership if it has not been renewed already.  When you log-in the site, you will also get a notice of your pending expiration date with a renewal link.  Selecting that link will allow you to renew your membership online and the system automates most processes that were previously manual steps that could create errors.

 

If you plan to send a check or credit card renewal, the system will allow you to print a form that can be used as an order for the renewal.

 

Users with PayPal autorenewals will also have them cancelled to avoid double payments.  These were easy to forgot and many hours were spent making sure that memberships had not been paid twice and processing refunds.

 

We hope that you enjoy the new process.  It is used by many genealogy societies and it is a major step forward for us.  

 

Please contact us at Memberships@ogsa.us after November 5, 2022 if you have any questions about the process.

In the past, OGSA needed to password protect our quarterly journals to allow online access for only our members.  This system was not ideal but our security options were limited by what we could do as volunteers.  Our new system offers a Members-only access capability that controls access to our newsletters.  The newsletters for 2021 and 2022 are online in our Journals page if you would like download journals without passwords to replace your existing copies.  This is not required but might simplify things for you if you were to lose the old passwords.

Were Your Ancestors Smugglers?, a webcast by Roger Peters on 9/22/2022 has been added to the Member Section, Research Downloads area.