President
Chris Pattillo’s interest in genealogy was piqued during a visit to the Oakland Mormon Temple when it opened in 1964. Since then she has researched and published four family history books and has a family history blog. She has been a member of CGS since 2004. In addition to serving on the board, Chris chaired the Website Development Committee in 2018-19, the Strategic Planning Committee in 2017-18, and the Capital Campaign 2016-17. She also chaired the Investment Committee for several years and the Development and Member Services Committee. She is currently the chair of the Library Committee. Chris is a frequent contributor to the CGS blog, the Watauga Newsletter in Tennessee, and has taught classes and given talks for CGS, and other genealogical societies.
Vice President
Joanna Shear was born in Boston, grew up in Missouri, and landed in the Bay Area 21 years ago. A member of CGS since 2016, she has a BS in physics from Indiana University, an MSE in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, and has completed Boston University’s Certificate Program in Genealogical Research. She was first drawn to genealogy by an unknown name on a mysterious engraved silver chalice, which led to a reunion for family separated by the Holocaust. Eleven years down the road, she is deep into the history of her Jewish ancestors as they moved within Europe and emigrated to other continents. She now also uses DNA to go beyond the documentation and trace new family connections. As her research for family and others has grown into new areas, so has her dedication to making genealogy open and accessible to all.
Investment Officer
James Sorenson has been seriously pursuing genealogy since 1994 and it has led him to visit more than 30 courthouses and at least that number of libraries. In the past couple of years, he has become more interested in DNA as a means of finding cousins, filling knowledge gaps and discovering surprises. Jim still gets excited about tracing a family, even when it is not his own. He has been a CGS member since 2007, and since 2010 he has been an active volunteer on the research and investment committees. Jim has also co-led CGS sponsored research trips to Salt Lake City and has previously served on the CGS Board as its president.
Treasurer
Matthew Berry became interested in family history research in 2003 during a family reunion. He was born in San Diego and grew up in Foster City before attending and receiving a BA and MS from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from Santa Clara University. Now retired from Wells Fargo Bank, Matt has been a member of CGS since 2006, has served as a desk duty volunteer in the past, and has taught several CGS classes on Microsoft Word skills for genealogists. His genealogical research has focused on California, New England and the American mid-west.
Recording Secretary
Evan Wilson grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where his love of genealogy was ignited by his grandmother’s stories and dedication to research. After completing a PhD in English and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley in 2019, he decided to work toward becoming a professional genealogist. His passion is the intersection of genealogy and social history—studying the ties within families, but also between families and others in their society. His own research is heavily Southern, but he’s also dipping his toes into California history and research these days. Other things he gets fired up about include genealogical writing and education, oral history, and the stories of marginalized people and communities.
Corresponding Secretary
Cindy Kim Thomson was born in Hawaii and is descended from Korean immigrants who arrived there in 1904. Her childhood interest in family stories morphed into an obsession with genealogy (particularly over the past 15 years) and annual visits to repositories, cemeteries, plantations and churches (as well as family) in Hawaii. She has been a volunteer on the CGS Desk Duty and Events Committees, and is a member of NGS. Reflecting the roots of her multi-ethnic extended family, her research has focused on immigrant sugar plantation workers in Hawaii, East Asian immigrants to Hawaii and California, and Japanese-American World War II internment. She has a B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, and is a retired Commerce Department economist.
Carly Morgan is the owner of Family Tree Notebooks, a shop that sells digital genealogy worksheets for people looking to organize their family trees. Her family has been in the Bay Area for almost two centuries and she has strong ties to the Chinese population of San Francisco, although she lives in Salt Lake City. A former attorney, Carly has been working as a marketer and content creator for more than ten years. She is the chair of the Marketing Committee.
worked as a geological oceanographer at Oregon State University, the University of Rhode Island, and Brown University, where he went on numerous research cruises, published more than a dozen original research papers and a nine sheet color bathymetric map series of the Peru-Chile trench, and earned a PhD in geophysics. He joined Gulf Oil as an exploration geologist in 1983 and worked in Angola, Papua New Guinea and other international locations. He moved to the Bay Area in 1985 and later worked in IT systems. He and his family spent five years in Bangkok and Singapore before returning to San Ramon in 2004. He spent the last few years of his career working on IT Reliability/Planning, before retiring in 2011. Roger became interested in family history when he asked his parents who all the ancestors in the unlabeled pictures were. He has published two papers in the NEHGS Register.
enjoyed hearing and recording, her family’s Japanese American WW II experiences at family events. She joined CGS in 2013 after taking the ‘Finding Your Japanese Roots’ class. Afterwards, she found her family’s WWII internment records in the National Archives, and traveled to Japan, procured her ancestors’ koseki (family registries), and visited their home prefectures. Her paternal ancestors have deep American roots with the most current immigration being from Ireland in 1835. Adelle has served on the CGS membership committee and is currently the chair of the Remote Communications Committee. She received a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from UC Irvine and worked as a software engineer for 30 years.
Having achieved Scouting’s Eagle rank, his volunteer work has also included leading Scout contingents to the east coast, England, Sweden, and Japan. Larry recently retired from his forty-three-year career as a member of senior Information Technology management teams within multiple corporations, including Clorox, IBM, Gap Inc., Charles Schwab, Citibank, and Raychem. Larry and his wife Pam reside in Pioneer, California and enjoy visiting their daughters and two grandchildren in Walnut Creek on a regular basis.
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