UGA Awards

Each year UGA presents several awards at the SLIG completion banquet.  The organization reached out to board members as well as past Fellows of UGA and Silver Tray award winners for nominations to be considered.  The awards were presented by Bret Petersen, UGA President.

Bret Petersen presents the FUGA
award to Thom Edlund

Thomas K. Edlund, a specialist in East European area studies, languages and record sources, was presented with the UGA Fellow award.  Thom entered the profession of genealogy at the Family History Library following a career with the USA Intelligence and Security Command.  As the first Slavic bibliographer, he created and codified collection development and catalogued standards for nine countries. He was a founding member of the FamilySearch Issues Group, created to investigate and actualize the corporatizing of FamilySearch.  He also conducted private research, specializing in Balkan, Russo-German, and Jewish research. 

Thom presently works at Brigham Young University, where he has developed and instructed curricula for Latin source documents, Slavic source documents, advanced Latin paleography, Church Slavonic, Slavic paleography, and micro-regional/local history research methodology.  He serves as department chair for Cataloging and Metadata at the Harold B. Lee Library and represents the university as the East European Areas Studies Librarian.

Thom is president of the Foundation for East European Family History Studies (FEEFHS), where he has actively served in various roles for over twenty years, including ten years as the FEEFHS Journal editor.  He has most recently affected change in the FEEFHS organizational structure toward support of a more substantial role in education, indexing, and record discovery projects.

Thom is an active speaker, having made over 250 conference presentations.  He also acts as a representative for family history in multiple organizations outside the genealogy industry. We welcome Thom to the FUGA family.

Dick Eastman accepts the Silver
Tray award on the anniversary of
the first release of his newsletter

Richard (Dick) Eastman could have stayed home and opened the bubbly to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first edition of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.  Instead, he celebrated with UGA board members, SLIG committee members, coordinators, instructors, and students at the 21^st annual SLIG banquet.

At that banquet, Bret Petersen, UGA President, presented Dick with the Silver Tray Award.  The award is given annually for scholarly contributions to the field of genealogy, traditionally demonstrated through publication efforts. That the banquet was on the 15^th of January, exactly twenty years from the date of his first release, was almost too good to be true, and Dick flew in just for the special occasion.

Dick has been involved in genealogy for more than 30 years.  He also worked in the computer industry in software, hardware, and management positions, for more than 40 years.  The two interests merged continually throughout his career, starting with the use of a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards back in the 1970s.

Long before the invention of the World Wide Web, Dick started a Genealogy Forum on CompuServe, the leading commercial online service of the day.  In 1995, he decided to start a small weekly e-newsletter.  It began on January 15, 1996 with about 100 recipients and has since grown into a daily electronic publication, now read by 75,000 people around the world. 

Janet Hovorka receives an
Award of Merit from Bret Petersen

Janet Hovorka, past-president of UGA, received the President’s Award of Merit.  Janet served as vice president of UGA in 2009, and as president from 2010 to 2013.  Under her leadership, UGA developed new committee initiatives, long term planning, and doubled membership.  During her two-term tenure, Janet worked with various committees, including education, publicity, publications, exhibits, chapters, historical, award, website, and volunteer resources.

Janet also served on the SLIG committee and as the vendor liaison for the UGA South Davis Conference for five years, oversaw the UGA Sandy conference for two years, the joint UGA/ICAPGen conference in 2013, and helped provide oversight for UGA’s partnership role in the National Genealogical Society Conference held in Salt Lake City in 2010.  

Janet holds a master’s degree in library and information science, is an instructor in the genealogy certificate program at Salt Lake Community College, lectures on various topics across the country and internationally, is an author, and is owner of Family ChartMasters.