The 2010 Charlottesville Family History Conference is pleased to announce that Faith Andrews Bedford will be the keynote speaker for this year’s conference.  Mrs. Andrews Bedford is a sought-after speaker on a variety of art and life-history subjects as well as an essayist whose short stories and memoirs have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers.

Mrs. Andrews Bedford’s skill in making her personal memories come alive makes her an ideal keynote speaker for this year’s conference, whose theme is “Your Life Story Is Your Legacy.” Conference attendees will be encouraged to create their legacies both for their own posterity and also for friends, family, and future generations.

Mrs. Andrews Bedford is a resident of Albemarle County. For years, the readers of Country Living have treasured her beloved bi-monthly column, “Kids in the Country.”  Her two most recent books, Barefoot Summers and Little Girls in Matching  Dresses, are collections of her stories.  She also teaches a class on writing memoirs for the University of Virginia’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute entitled from “Memories to Memoirs.”

Conference Director Bob Roberts says,”Faith offers an interesting perspective in helping you to examine your memories and find those stories and thoughts that create contemporary life history.  This is the goal of our conference – to inspire people to write it down while it is fresh in your minds so that future generations will not have to  dig it up through years of research and then still not have you remembered they way you wanted!”

Mrs. Andrews Bedford  is also a noted authority on the American painter, Frank W. Benson. She has written and lectured extensively on the artist and has contributed the lead essays for a number of catalogues including: the Benson retrospective at the Berry-Hill Gallery in New York City in l989, the exhibition of Benson’s sporting art at the Ward Museum in Salisbury, MD in 1996, and the Peabody Essex Museum’s show “Frank W. Benson: American Impressionist” in 2000 for which she was the guest curator.

She has written Frank W. Benson American Impressionist (Rizzoli) and The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson (David R. Godine) as well as many articles on the artist. She supplies appraisals, essay entries and authentications to the major the auction houses as well as for many private galleries and is the advisor to the Benson catalogue raisonné.  Frank W. Benson was her great grandfather.

To learn more about Frank W. Benson or Mrs. Andrews Bedford’s writing please  click on www.frankwbenson.com or www.faithandrewsbedford.com. To see a description of her course for OLLI go to  http://www.virginia.edu/olliuva/descriptions.html#b34.

Learn more about the conference on our 2010 Conference page.