Christine Bachman-Sanders is a researcher in the Research & Library Services Department. She specializes in writing Ahnentafel and Register-style family history books. She has expertise in researching early New England, mid-Atlantic, and mid-western immigration, migrations, and settlement, and in researching the descendants of enslaved people. Christine has experience organizing and expanding on existing family research projects, including incorporating oral histories and embedding family narratives into larger historical contexts. Christine views genealogical research as a way to build connections and empathy across communities, investigating how our families and histories interact.

Before joining American Ancestors, Christine taught writing and history courses to undergraduates at Merrimack College, the University of Minnesota, and New York University. She holds a BA in Women's and Gender Studies from Middlebury College, an MA in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her academic work is rooted in a feminist approach to historical and archival research, and relies substantially on genealogical records, particularly for research she conducted to identify the name of a long-anonymous cyclist and diarist located in the cycling archives in the UK. She has published in Gender & History and contributed an essay to Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays, edited by Dave Buchanan and Kimberly Morse Jones. She is also a contributor to American Ancestors’ Vita Brevis.

Areas of expertise: New England, mid-Atlantic, and mid-western immigration, migration, and settlement, African American history, 19th and 20th century American and British history, writing Ahnentafel and Register-style family history narratives, German fluency