Eastern Kentucky Genealogy Conference 2012

          Cheri Daniels, MSLS, is a Senior Librarian and Reference Specialist at the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort. With over 20 years of library and genealogy/local history experience, she is President and Co-Founder of Pastology.com, author of the Journeys Past blog (http://www.journeyspast.blogspot.com/) and speaker at the 2012 NGS Conference in Cincinnati. She is also a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society.

         A native born, 7th generation Kentuckian, Ms. Daniels recently returned to Kentucky in 1993 after being raised in Cincinnati. Her return to Kentucky completes the circular migration that began with her Father's family who left Magoffin, Floyd & Johnson Counties to find work in Ohio in the 1920s. Upon return to Kentucky with her family she completed her B.A. in History and her Master of Science in Library Science, both at the University of Kentucky, where she simultaneously worked at the William T. Young Library for over eleven years.



         Jackie Edmondson Couture has worked in the Eastern Kentucky University Special Collections and Archives for over twenty years. Throughout this time she has assisted researchers tracing their ancestors and taught classes in genealogy. She has served on the board of the Madison County Historical Society for the past six years and has compiled and edited their biannual publication, Heritage Highlights for about fifteen years.



      Cindy Peck is the Area Director of Eastern Kentucky University’s Danville Regional Campus and the Lancaster Higher Education Center. She graduated from EKU and The Ohio State University with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English. For 17 years she worked in educational publishing as the Assistant Managing Editor at McGraw-Hill/Simon & Schuster. She has been an adjunct instructor of English and an academic advisor at EKU, and she has served as the director at the EKU Danville Campus since 2002.

       Cindy became interested in using DNA as a tool to help identify one’s “deep” ancestry in 2006, when she took part in National Geographic’s “Genographic Project.” That project has been instrumental in identifying haplogroups—branches of the human family tree. The project also helps genealogists trace ancestral migration patterns. Cindy has been a member of a professional learning community in genealogy at EKU since its beginning in 2010. She is working with Family Tree DNA, Inc. to develop teaching materials that can be used by students to combine DNA research and historical research techniques to learn more about their own families and culture.

       Her father’s family members are natives of Morgan, Menifee, and Wolfe Counties, so she has a strong interest in the history of eastern Kentucky. 

       Walter Bowman is the Research Room Supervisor at KDLA a position he has
held since 2007. Mr. Bowman is a native of Virginia and attend Berea
College and  lives in Lexington . He entered  state government in 1989
as an Archivist for the Kentucky Department of Military Affairs and came
to KDLA in 2002