Featured Speakers

MAUREEN TAYLOR
The Last Muster

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of history, genealogy, and photography. She has been featured in top media outlets, including The View, Better Homes & Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, MSNBC, Life Magazine, PBS Ancestors and more. The author of a number of books and magazine articles, she also is a contributing editor at Family Tree Magazine and editorial board member of Legacy Magazine. Over the past decade, Taylor has provided in-depth analysis of approximately 10,000 historical photos. The Wall Street Journal recently called her “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective.” With a graduate degree in history, she has risen to the top of her field by bridging the disciplines of genealogy, art history, costume history, and cultural anthropology.

Taylor’s presentation is titled “The Last Muster.” As unbelievable as it seems, many individuals who participated in the American Revolution lived past the advent of photography in 1839. Our conference audience will take a step back into the eighteenth century through the photographs and stories of these people. Don’t miss this chance to learn about the detective work involved in uncovering these “misplaced” pictures. Meanwhile, visit www.photodetective.com

Kurt Medina
77 Truths About the Age 50+ Consumer

Marketing to the Mature Market

Mature market expert Kurt Medina will share the latest trends, and secrets about the growing market of Boomers and Seniors. How do you make both want to read your materials? Medina will lead an informative, example-filled session concentrating on the critical mature market elements you must know to succeed. Learn the physical changes of maturing and why you need to work with them. Understand the "Five Critical Values" to put into every personal history and communication with 50+’ers. Each attendee will receive a free copy of Medina’s book, 77 Truths About Marketing to the 50+ Consumer.

When you leave, you will…

• Understand the three primary marketing segments of the 50+ audience (and see some of the many sub-segments)
• Have viewed many up-to-the minute examples of current mature market communications and learned why some work and some definitely do not
• Obtain tools to create personal histories that truly relate to the needs and interests of your clients
• Walk away with at least three immediately usable ideas

DR. CHARLES A. HARDY III
Working with Oral Histories

Dr. Hardy has been conducting oral history interviews since the late 1970s. Current president of the Oral History Association, he has produced award-winning radio, video, and web-based documentaries, including the 1999 Oral History Association Biennial Nonprint Media award. His recent work in oral history includes “Authoring in Sound: Aural History, Radio, and the Digital Revolution,” published in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edition, (Routledge, 2006), and “Painting in Sound: Aural History and Audio Art,” to be published in Oral History: The Art of Dialogue (John Benjamins Publishing, 2009). A professor of history at West Chester University, he also has served since 2003 as the supervising historian of ExplorePAhistory.com—an Edsitement listed, collaborative, state history website that builds historical content and lesson plans around Pennsylvania’s historical markers.

Dr. Hardy will cover a number of topics during his free-range talk, including his own work in oral history, the work of the Oral History Association, and oral history best practice (and how personal historians might apply this to their own work). He will discuss the challenges of technological obsolescence, the impact of memory studies upon our understanding of autobiographical recollections, training opportunities in oral history, and more.

LILY KOPPEL
The Red Leather Diary

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, writes for the New York Times and numerous other publications. Our APH conference audience will enjoy the writer’s fascinating, true story of her discovery of a young woman’s diary, kept in New York in the 1930s and fished out of a dumpster outside of Koppel's Manhattan apartment building. She also will describe her experience of later returning the diary to its owner, 90-year-old Florence Wolfson.

Little did Koppel know, when she first found the diary, that it would become a vehicle for time travel. As one reviewer has written of The Red Leather Diary, "By taking her diary and surrounding it with so much historical detail, Koppel shows how one single figure from a city's past can frame a large scale social history that in its narrowness—that of a young woman of a specific class, ethnicity and location—can still be epic in scope. America's identity is found in stories like this..."

For more information about Lily Koppel, visit www.redleatherdiary.com