A Manitoba Genealogical Society member since 1996 he has been active with the Society and MGS Winnipeg Branch. He presented almost 50 programs to the branch as well as sessions at MGS provincial seminars. Gordon served as VP Information Technology at MGS from 2011 to 2017. Before that (1998 on) he was computer Chairman for MGS. He has worked to upgrade the MGS computer systems and was the architect and developer of the MGS MANI online database project. In 2023 Gordon was awarded the “Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers” by the Governor General of Canada for his volunteer work with MGS.
Gordon has presented at provincial genealogy conferences in Ontario and across Western Canada and into the Us. He has presented webinars in those areas as well.
Gordon has spent his life in technology. He was the kid who could get the 16mm projector working in elementary and by junior high he was the go to guy for the schools closed circuit television system, the first in Manitoba. He chose a career in Theatre and Broadcasting and worked in both of those fields before getting involved in educational technology in 1972. He worked for 40 years helping college instructors prepare classroom material. At Red River College he created the Teaching Learning Technology Centre to support and train instructors in the use of technology ranging from personal computers to putting their courses online. In addition to audio and video Gordon is an avid photographer. When not involved in these activities and of course genealogy, Gordon loves to cross country ski, cycle, canoe and travel with his wife. They travel in their RV around North America, with much genealogy and cemetery visiting!
As a teen Gordon was recouping from an operation and his mother got him started doing genealogy. When Gordon first got a Personal Computer he transferred that information into software on the computer. Sometime in the 1990’s he was cleaning out my mother’s basement and came across a cache of old photographs that were from his father’s side of the family. Unfortunately most of the pictures did not name the people in them. He wanted to assign a name to every face in the photos and thus entered into the dark never ending black hole known as “genealogical research” seriously. Gordon later discovered a large box of negatives, definitely no name written there. He then entered into the world of online genealogy and crowdsourcing in an attempt to identify those people.
