More from NGS 2026, Fort Wayne, Indiana

We have big news from Fort Wayne, Indiana. The US National Genealogical Society has given us their Award of Merit for 2026 at their annual conference here.

 

This was primarily in respect of our efforts to preserve our members’ work.

 

See the Guild’s news item here:

 

So we have at least three groups of members to thank:

1 – those who came up with the idea of the MWP and first trialled it: their names are listed here:

2 – those who have implemented it, and continue to do so

3 – those who have had confidence enough to preserve their studies

 

Thank you all. The MWP’s existence and our global marriage index are a great source of engagement with visitors to our booth here and can only get better as more members take advantage of these different ways to share our work.

 

From the perspective of extending Guild membership, having worked stalls/booths on both sides of the Atlantic over the past month or so, I cannot tell you how important it is to have more members using the MWP and submitting marriages to our global marriage index. It’s not necessarily the actual names under study but the HUGE range of other surnames that are covered in our studies. It’s great to be able to show people of continental European descent that their names have already appeared in our work, and defy the expectation that we are just British. It gives both us and our visitors confidence to have a deeper conversation.

 

Several times over the past few days I’ve talked with people of Italian or German heritage where their surname appears in one or more of our existing studies in the very next county to where they live. They have been pleasantly surprised! So was I on at least a couple of occasions!

 

So please do consider contributing to one or both of these excellent repositories.