2025 CGSI Conference Tours

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

This tour via deluxe 56-passenger coach bus will have a morning stop at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri. The event will be organized by the library’s programs manager and is open to the public. The program will be a panel discussion entitled “Czechoslovakia and the Truman Years.” One of the CGSI referred “virtual” speakers is Michal Razus of Prešov, Slovakia, a past CGSI conference speaker. 

Dr. Sam Rushay, Supervisory Archivist will speak on the library’s relevant holdings as part of the event. He is a historian from Ohio and a leading Truman scholar. Following the panel discussion will be a one-hour tour of the Museum. 

Lunch will be included in the tour. The location and food for the tour has not yet been determined. 

The afternoon portion of the tour will be a visit to the World War I Museum and Monument in Kansas City, Missouri. The museum has material and artifacts from the American military and also the Austro-Hungarian military along with their successor states, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia. 

The tour organizer and chaperone will be CGSI member Linda O’Brien of Weston, MO. 
Check back at a later time for the tour price.

Wednesday October 29, 2025

This tour via a 56-passenger deluxe coach bus, includes three stops beginning with the Midwest Genealogy Center (MGC), Independence, MO. The MGC is one of the United States’ preeminent resources for family history, providing access to almost three-quarters of a million on-site materials. The stop at MGC will include a one-hour orientation of the facility and its collections and another one-hour to perform your own browsing of individual books or materials in the facility’s collection. 

The second tour stop will be Strawberry Hill Museum in Kansas City, KS. The Museum, the former Cruise-Scroggs mansion and later an orphanage, houses rooms that hold cultural artifacts and information on the nationalities that settled Kansas City. There are nine different nationalities represented including Slovak, Ukrainian, Polish, Croatian, and Slovenian. A Slavic catered lunch will be served at the museum. It includes a salad and a cabbage roll, polish sausage and sauerkraut, German potato salad, green beans, and a roll. Dessert is a slice of povitica (Croatian nut bread). 

The final stop will be at the Strawberry Hill Baking Company in Merriam, Kansas. They have been famous since 1903 for their Povitica Croatian pastries.

Check back at a later time for the price of this tour as CGSI is still working on details.