Follow Friday: Charles Hansen

You may know that I am one of three team bloggers that write for the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society blog. One of the other team members is Donna Potter Phillips (you may recognize the name from the many articles she's written for various genealogy magazines, and also as a member of the Salt Lake Christmas Tour guides). The third team member for the EWGS blog is Charles Hansen. Charles is our society's researcher, and is responsible for doing lookups for people who write or email our society asking for help with local records. He's been honored with many awards for his volunteerism for our society, the local public library, and the Washington State Digital Archives. He is a Distinguished Service Member of our society as well.

I am writing about Charles because I would like to highlight a series he is doing for the EWGS blog that is just fantastic. Our society will be celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, and in honor of that, Charles has been writing about each of our society's presidents from its inception to the present. He found a scrapbook that was created many years ago, and then has expanded on each president by doing research on them...something Charles knows how to do best! The articles are interesting as they correlate with the history of our society and city; plus, it is engaging to see the different local resources Charles has tapped into to fill out each biography. If your genealogical society has a blog, you might consider imitating this series.

Charles also has a personal genealogy blog, Mikkel's Hus. He's become a regular part of the geneablogging community as he participates in carnivals, Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Wordless Wednesday, and the like.

I encourage you to "follow" Charles on his blogs, and if you ever have a research question about the Inland Northwest area, please don't hesitate to contact him. He is the go-to person!