Back To Rotary: Upcoming Presentations

When I felt my phone vibrate I immediately thought it was one of the usual family or lodge suspects sending me an update or asking me a question. What I didn’t expect to read when I opened up my text messages was a request from the President of the Rotary Club of Bala Cynwyd – Narberth to be a guest speaker at one of the upcoming meetings. While it has been some time since I was last a regular member, I am still proud to hold the title of Honorary Rotarian and it will certainly be a privilege and pleasure to reconnect with the people who have continued to support me despite my long absence. Following our brief conversation, I will not only have one opportunity to revisit this find group but two opportunities to join them for lunch in the coming months.

The first presentation I will be making is on the transforming my everyday experiences into a daily blog and, recently, into a collection of books. I started my blog while still very active with the club and I have continued writing daily posts. Now numbering over a thousand, I have begun the process of transforming those posts into essay collections on individual topics.

The first book to result from this effort is The Good, The Bad, And The Adorable: My First Year As A Father which recounts all the moments from the time my wife and I found out we were having a baby all the way through my son’s first birthday. I guess you could call it a baby book on steroids. The second book, Out On the Limbs: Searching For Answers In The Family Tree, was released at the same time and includes many of the family stories that have been passed down to me as well as the recreations of some of the lives of my ancestors which I have pieced together through years of research. Of course, there are numerous more on the way this year but this gives you a sense of the subject of this presentation.   

While genealogy is a topic that I have discussed before during a meeting this presentation will be completely different than the last one. The second presentation, which was actually the original impetus for the outreach, will be on the research, application process, and joining the Sons of the American Revolution. This has been a goal for several years and now it is finally coming to fruition. During this presentation I will not only talk about the discovery of this family line which was unfamiliar to the family during my youth but the process of researching and ultimately proving this lineage to the point where it will stand up to the scrutiny of an independent third party such as the Sons of the American Revolution. Of course, this is just the beginning and I will also touch upon the repetition of this process that is before me as I begin pulling together the documentation for thirty supplemental applications.

All that is left is to coordinate a day that works in my schedule. Hopefully, this will be a regular commitment as I continue writing and researching… there are certainly enough topics that I can speak on, maybe not intelligently but enough for a presentation. But, for now, I will enjoy the opportunity to visit my club, share my passions, and spend a couple of days with some great friends.