Fourth Wednesday

2025 Lunch & Learn Topics

Sep 24 –  Michele Bailey

We are so excited to have the opportunity to bring to you an in-person and professional speaker for our Lunch & Learn next week. It is not often we are able to do that and we cannot thank Michele Bailey enough for agreeing to take the time from her very busy schedule to bring this talk to us. She is President of East Texas Genealogical Society, Director of Education for Texas State Genealogical Society and the Event Coordinator for the 23rd Annual Family History Conference – East Texas, being held in Tyler on October 11, 2025, to name only a few of her commitments.

Lunch & Learn will be held this coming Wednesday, September 24, 2025, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 611 North Davis St., Sulphur Springs, Tx. The Hopkins County Genealogical Society invites anyone who wants to learn more about doing genealogical research to join us. You are encouraged to bring your laptop or tablet, and your sack lunch, salad or drive-through meal.

Michele will be bringing us a program entitled, “Next-Level Genealogy: AI Innovations from FamilySearch and Beyond.” You will discover how AI – within FamilySearch and from other leading innovators – is revolutionizing how we locate and analyze records. You will learn practical ways to integrate these tools into your research process. Research faster, smarter, and BETTER! Reveal records that you didn’t even know existed! This is NOT just a video, although the talk will be accompanied by a slideshow!

So, please make a note of this date and time and plan to join us. Michele is driving from Tyler to bring us this 1-hour program and we want to show her how much we appreciate that and how much we appreciate the opportunity to learn something new and exciting!

Aug 28 – 

Lunch & Learn will be held Wednesday, August 27, 2025, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 611 North Davis St., Sulphur Springs, Tx. Many of our members and even some of our volunteers are not completely comfortable with creating or modifying a family tree on FamilySearch, which is the one website you can use for free, so we are going to learn a little more about how to do that. We are going to review how to build a family tree in FamilySearch and how to fix mistakes in a family tree in FamilySearch easily – including a guide to merging and/or deleting those mistakes. Please join us and bring along a friend. We’re sure you will find something new and enlightening to improve your “building” skills!

May 27 – Rhonda Bechhold

Lunch & Learn will be held next Wednesday, May 28, 2025, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 611 North Davis St., Sulphur Springs, TX. The Hopkins County Genealogical Society invites anyone who wants to learn more about doing genealogical research to join us. For this month’s session you are encouraged to bring your laptop or tablet, and your sack lunch, salad or drive-through meal. We do have some snacks and drinks available for purchase.

Rhonda Bechhold is going to lead us in a deep-dive of the HCGS website. Many of our members and even some of our volunteers are not completely comfortable with navigating the website and may be missing out on some of the research tools it has to offer. Please join us for Rhonda’s presentation and bring along a friend. We’re sure you will find something new and enlightening to improve your genealogical research.

Apr 23 – Sandy Noe
Our own volunteer and long-time member, Sandy Noe, will be introducing us to an often overlooked asset to our research when she talks to us about FamilySearch Affiliate Libraries, of which we are one.  Thousands of FamilySearch affiliate libraries are helping extend FamilySearch’s services to millions of patrons worldwide.  Affiliate libraries have access to FamilySearch digital genealogical collections that are otherwise accessible only through a FamilySearch center.

Feb 26 – Donna Toups
Donna Toups’ topic will be “Digging for Answers & Answering Questions” through the use of familysearch.org.  Whether you have a laptop to bring or not, you are sure to take away some helpful tips and information from this FamilySearch expert!

Jan 22 –
We are excited to have our society president, John A. Sellers, as our speaker to start out this new year. John’s topic will be “Our Library’s Lesser-Known Records.”  We are absolutely sure you will be surprised to hear about some of the records we have available you didn’t know about. You all know what a great speaker John is so we hope you will come and bring some other folks with you!