Catalog of Lectures

The 20th century was the age of the passenger list. Unlike the previous centuries, ship manifests from this time focused on the individual passengers and provide a goldmine of information for family historians. To fully understand and analyze passenger lists, we need to understand how they were created, what information is included, and what inferences can be made. This presentation will also discuss strategies for narrowing your search when a passenger list can’t be found and piecing together an entire family’s movements to the United States. 

 Learn about the various colonial wars that 17th and 18th New Englanders participated in.  We will discuss published and manuscript resources, and how to "Adopt the Regiment" to learn more about your ancestor through associated records.  

Do you have ancestors from the Deep South? In this webinar, we will address key challenges in researching families from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and offer tips and solutions for getting ahead. Topics include migration and settlement patterns, what to do when vital records are not available, how to leverage land, probate, and tax records, and finding confederate records. The session concludes with tips for conducting African American research in the region.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American cities seemingly sprang up overnight as new industries, new immigrant populations, and new opportunities blossomed. Finding your ancestor in a growing metropolis can be tricky. Luckily there are several resources, records, and research strategies available to assist you in your search. We will discuss some of these key sources and techniques for researching your urban ancestry.

Using case studies, this lecture introduces the Family Historian to cluster research for Irish Research.  Cluster Research involves identifying the ancestor’s FAN club: family, associates and neighbors.   

This lecture will provide you with key strategies to leverage the information you find in Christian church records: how to use church records in conjunction with civil records, how to use them as vital record substitutes, how to identify witnesses, and generally how they can be used to break down brick walls in your family history research. 

Unclear as to what date “21 1mo 1708/9” refers to? What about “4 Mary”? While dates are foundational to your family history research, they’re not always straightforward in the record or follow a modern calendar system. This online lecture will go over common calendar systems that you may encounter in your research, discuss how to interpret and record them, and suggest several online conversion tools to understand these dates in familiar terms.

Ireland has a unique and rather confusing system of land divisions, all of which need to be known and understood to effectively and accurately look for your ancestors. 

This lecture discusses the history of Irish Immigration to Canada and sources of information such as passenger Lists and alternative records.  Next specific groups of settlers are covered such as the Halifax Irish, the Peter Robinson settlers, the Monaghan settlers, the Famine Irish. The role of emigrant aid societies is also covered, such as the Montreal Emigrant Society. 

When we think of Christian records, we may immediately think of baptism and marriage records. While these are crucial records, there are many more! This lecture will look at what records exist, what information is provided, and how they differ among denominations.