Personal Introduction

Welcome to my Genealogy web site!! Please let me introduce myself. My name is Shirley Trude. I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.  I moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in the year 2000, primarily because I wanted a change of lifestyle and have always found Las Vegas to be a city that I would someday want to live in, having been here on many past visits.   I learned that even though it offers wonderful daily and nightly entertainment, it was the desert, the blue skies, the mountains, and the abundance of sunny days that truly captured my attention.

My work experience, for the most part, has always been in Information Technology. I began my IT career as an Assistant Database Administrator and Trainer, working for Illinois Bell, an A.T. & T. company at the time.   I then succeeded to a position as Manager of Automation in Real Estate Management, where I was responsible for the mechanization of 4 divisional units. My later work experiences include working at Northeastern Illinois University as an IT Training Specialist, developing and implementing computer training for faculty and staff, and also a Systems Analyst at Conseco, where I helped support both PC software and hardware, to include 16 PC network servers, and also MVS mainframe connections.

My education includes a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree, specializing in Business Data Processing.  Although I have never been a full time computer programmer, I do know mainframe programming languages (COBOL, CICS, Assembler, Pascal, Focus, and OS JCL ) working in a VM/CMS and MVS environment.  My desire to work more closely with people in a support and training capacity led me away from always sitting at a computer, just programming.  I am not insinuating that programmers just sit around and program; they do so much more, including team projects and working with clients. But my desire to be more interactively involved helping people was more important to me. Also, the ability to share information with others, allowing them to feel better about themselves and what they could do,  motivated me to do support and training.

I am attending classes for the Web Masters Certification at UNLV and plan to finish in all 3 tracks of the program.  I have been accessing the Internet since 1993 and have developed a few sites since this time. My goal is to be one of the best Web Designers possible. I know I have a lot of competition, but competition is healthy; it keeps you striving to do your best.

The most important interest in my personal life has been Genealogy. This is why I have this site. I am proud that I have been able to find information on my ancestors that dates back as far as 1817 in America, and my husband's ancestry dates back from 1777.  I am proud to have been a part of a family team effort which published a Trude and DeTrude book in 1999 and have a Trude web site. I truly believe that we are all linked to the past, present, and future through each other. I welcome your first visit and hope you come again, as I will continually update this site. Please feel to e-mail me at any time.

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