You may know that your ancestor was Christian, but to really make headway in your research, you need to know what denomination(s) they followed. To find that information, you must first understand context. This lecture will provide a brief history and background of Christian denominations in the United States and how geography, time period, community, family artifacts, and more can give you the clues you need to proceed. 

Was your ancestor a Freemason, an Odd Fellow, a Knight of Columbus, or a member of another fraternal organization? In this webinar, we will teach you how to identify different fraternal organizations, provide valuable tools for locating a lodge and its records, and discuss how these records can enrich your family history research.

Once you know what denomination your ancestor belonged to and the church they attended, it’s time to find the records. With the understanding that not everything is online, this lecture will discuss navigating online resources, researching manuscript materials at denominational archives, and working directly with the church. 

City and rural directories can be incredibly useful resources for genealogists. They can help you pinpoint a time and place for ancestors on the move, offer occupational information, and even help give clues to death and marriage dates. You will learn how these resources were created, what information is generally provided, where to locate these sources online or in print, and how to use these records effectively in your family history research.

The choice of a genealogical software program may be one of the more personal decisions in genealogy. This lecture reviews the essential features of a smorgasbord of programs currently available to the family historian.  Programs differ in how they handle names, dates, places, sources and merging duplicates. The talk highlights key features of each with a focus on data entry, importing data, ability to tailor citations, reporting capabilities, chart generation, and reliability checks. By the end of the program, the attendee should have a good sense of which program might suit their needs and research habits. 

Today there are an estimated 7.6 million Jewish Americans living in the country, the majority of whom descend from diaspora Jewish populations from Central and Eastern Europe. Learning how to trace your Jewish ancestry is not without its challenges: changing surnames, locating your ancestor's home village or shtetl, and access to overseas records are just the tip of the iceberg. This webinar will discuss the historical context of your ancestor's arrival in the United States, review American records that can be helpful in your research, and provide basic strategies for uncovering your ancestor's exact origins in the old country.

This lecture will provide the basics on key terms you’re likely to encounter and how to decipher old German script—Kurrent/Sütterlin or "deutsche Schrift"—and German Gothic (Fraktur) font. 

While most countries base citizenship on place of birth, parentage, and marriage, some countries also offer citizenship by descent—meaning if you have ancestors who were citizens of that country two, three, or even four generations back, you might qualify for dual citizenship! Two well-known examples are Italy and Ireland. In this webinar, we will go over the requirements involved for these two countries, gathering documentation, applying—and waiting—for dual citizenship.

Centuries of Irish history were lost as a result of the Four Courts Fire in Dublin in 1922. We will delve into the history leading up to the battle at the Four Courts, discuss the records that were housed in the Public Records Office, and explain why their destruction has made researching in Ireland so difficult. The lecture will also include record alternatives, what survived, records in other repositories and an initiative to recreate a virtual Public Records Office.

In researching your family history, you quickly become inundated with physical copies, email and other electronic files, handwritten notes, photographs, research logs, and more. We will discuss various systems on how to organize your files, so you can easily return to your work, find what you need on a particular person or family, and not duplicate your efforts.