Noel Elliot
Noel Montgomery Elliot was born in Toronto, Canada, and because of his father's work, had a wide-ranging public school education in urban schools in New York City, NY; Vancouver, BC, and finally a rural one-room school in Toronto Township, Ontario. He acquired his advanced class licence in radio telecommunications while in high school, and immediately intercepted the first Russian "sputnik" satellite in 1957, which was broadcasted across Canada in the evening news, and this teenager's feat earned front-cover newspaper stories in 1957. His interest in global events was peaked by conversing and socializing by short-wave radio with people scattered around the world in foreign countries, often before he would board the school bus from the family farm each morning to attend high school in Brampton, and later Streetsville. After graduating from Grade XIII he attended universities in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Sir Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, before graduating from Lakeshore Teachers College in Toronto. After graduation, he was a music supervisor and teacher in Toronto Gore Township, and later in Brampton, Ontario. In 1977 he created the "Family Tree Kit" which has since launched an estimated 250,000 people into tracing their ancestry. In 1984, he created a 3-volume set of books, People of Ontario 1600-1900. This was an unprecedented province-wide research set listing details about 265,000 ancestors, indexed from a wide variety of sources. These books were eagerly sought after by the public throughout Canada and the USA. In the 1990's, Mr. Elliot went on to create and edit 5 multi-volume sets of books, which included ancestors who lived in every province and territory in Canada: The Atlantic Canadians 1600-1900 (3 volumes)The Central Canadians 1600-1900 (3 volumes)The French Canadians 1600-1900 (3 volumes)The Western Canadians 1600-1900 (3 volumes)Les Canadiens français 1600-1900. (3 volumes) These 3-volume reference sets were acquired by libraries and archives throughout North America. The books are rare and out-of-print now, but are still eagerly sought after in antiquarian book stores. Since 1981 when The Genealogical Research Library was formed, he has held the position of Director of Research. He was one of the earliest advocates of using the internet for database searching, and in 1999 created the GRL.com web site to host databases and eBooks. Mr. Elliot foresaw at a very early stage that the internet would literally explode with information and that only global websites could handle the future databases required. The GRL website now has over 100,000 genealogical resources listed in more than 100 countries. He has lectured and been the guest speaker at conventions, and has been interviewed on national, regional and local television in Canada and the USA.
Workshops - Previous Conferences
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