Gordon McBean is a retired Educational Technologist from Red River College. He supported college staff’s use of Microsoft Office products and ran training courses for staff on MS Office and other technologies used in the educational environment.
He has been a member of the Manitoba Genealogical Society member since 1996, and has been active with the MGS Winnipeg Branch. He has presented programs 40+ times to the Branch, as well as sessions at the Manitoba and Saskatchewan provincial seminars. He has worked to upgrade the MGS computer systems and was the architect and developer of the MGS MANI online database project. MANI (MAnitoba Name Index) has grown to over 1,500,000 index records of Manitoba names found in various publications and cemetery transcriptions. In 2023 he was awarded the “Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers” by the Governor General of Canada for his work with MGS.
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 genealogy information into software on the computer. Sometime in the 1990s he was cleaning out his 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 never-ending black hole known as “genealogical research”. 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.
Bonus Track
Cameras My Ancestors Held and What They Can Tell Us?
