Distinguished Service Award

A sincere and lasting interest in family history brings us here today . . . . and has brought the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International together for ALMOST 25 years for annual meetings, quarterly meetings, conferences, festivals, sales, publications (to name a few) . . . . the list of member services is long.

              
                        Ginger Simek accepts the Award from Dave Pavelka

WE ARE A VOLUNTEER ORGANIZATION. We are successful because there are volunteers who enjoy discovering and sharing resources and also enjoy sharing their research skills.
Today we honor one such individual.

CGSI established the Distinguished Service Award to recognize those individuals who have made significant contributions to the society over a long period of time. These contributions are typically representative of efforts that go above and beyond the “job description” for whatever position the individual may hold. And they are significant because these efforts enhance the society’s excellent reputation.

In 2004, the award was renamed the Rosemary Lindlan CGSI Distinguished Service Award to honor the late Rosemary Lindlam who exemplified this level of service. The person receiving the award today has served CGSI for many years, and has a member number of 337 – this number goes back almost 25 years to the earliest days of CGSI! She has held a number of positions in the society prior to her current one. These include Corresponding Secretary in the early 1990s, Education Committee Chair, and the Board of Directors.

But even more significant are the special projects she undertook in addition to the responsibilities of these positions.

1. Responding to Member Research Requests – For many years she was the primary person responsible for either doing the research request or coordinating its completion, and then providing the written response to the requestor. This is a very important service that the society provides and she always completed it in a competent, friendly and timely manner.
2. Das Konig rech Bohmen (The Kingdom of Bohemia) – This is the title of a sixteen volume set of books acquired by the society for our library. Each volume contains a wealth of information on each of the districts of Bohemia as they existed in the early 1800s; e.g. listing of each estate and village, estate ownership, the parish church for each village, the military recruitment district, etc. However, the books are written in Factur or German Gothic script which can be difficult to decipher. She undertook a project to convert the name registers into readable German and prepared an English-language guide to using the registers and volumes.
3. Surname Indexes – She has been a member of the teams that prepared the CGSI surname indexes over the years.
4. She has willingly volunteered for many other tasks, too numerous to list, associated with various CGSI events.

For the past almost six years she has been the president of CGSI. During this time she has demonstrated a high level of leadership and administrative skills. Among the more significant and demanding projects are:

1. Working with the Minnesota Genealogical Society to find a new facility after a lease for Golden Valley facility was no longer available, and to provide leadership for the CGSI move to this facility from Golden Valley.
2. Providing leadership in dealing with some very significant security issues with the CGSI web site. This involved new vendor selection, decisions on software and generally dealing with cost and performance decisions.

She has helped bring us into the digital age. In addition to all of this members have commented over and over again that our recipient has a very diplomatic way of dealing with people in person or by e-mail. She has a special way of making people feel comfortable and appreciated.

It is a true honor to be presenting the 2012 Rosemary Lindlam CGSI Distiguished Service Award to Ginger Simek.