Volunteer-of-the-YearElizabeth "Argall" Andrews
Making the Presentation, Jan Fralic-Brown:
GANS is blessed to have many outstanding and faithful volunteers. Some of them I’m sure are familiar to many of you, perhaps from public interactions at GANS office events or at other venues. Others, however, work hard in our back offices, in front of a microfilm reader at the Archives, or from their homes, near and distant. Tonight we are recognizing one of our back office heroes. It’s my great pleasure to present the Volunteer of the Year Award to Miz Liz Andrews, our
redoubtable data development team leader. If you’ve ever searched our expanding obituary database, you know her work. But she’s done more than that in her time with us.
Liz has been with GANS as a volunteer since at least 2014. She handles everything we throw at her with humor and coffee, and just gets to it. She was our Membership Coordinator, back in the early
days before we moved to online join and renewal, and was a valuable asset on our Board of Directors.
These days, she becomes one with the scanner on occasion, or so we believe. She is responsible for the team adding hundreds of obituary references, images, and transcriptions to our database each month, which includes scanning, editing and checking transcribed records; as well as deleting or merging duplicate records when necessary. At this moment, there are about 284,000
obituary records in the database, many with attached scanned obituaries or transcriptions. That’s Liz’s baby.
She has laser focus, a sharp wit, and the kind of dedication that needs to be appreciated. But what truly endears her to my heart are the many books she regularly donates to the GANS library. Liz, please come up and receive this entirely inadequate expression of our thanks for your work this year, and every year. You’re amazing!