IAJGS 2019 - Four Talks and a SIG Meeting

We're three weeks out from IAJGS2019, which will be held in Cleveland this year (quite a difference from last year in Warsaw!)  I'll be pretty busy while there, presenting four separate times plus leading a SIG meeting.  And if you're trying to figure out how to find your family in the numerous Russian Empire records that are coming online or how to use DNA to find your family, hopefully I'll see you at one of my talks!  Here are some of the details of my presentations:

Presenting at OGS a Few Years Ago

• Monday July 29: "Subcarpathia SIG Meeting"
• This one isn't really a talk, but I'll be giving an update on what we've been doing in the Subcarpathia SIG.  If you have relatives from this part of Europe (now in Ukraine but formerly Hungary & Czechoslovakia), come see what's been happening! (Hint: Lots of records being acquired and indexed.)
• Tuesday July 30: "Genetic Genealogy 101"
• This is a basic introduction to genetic genealogy.  You'll learn the different types of DNA tests available and what questions they potentially can (and cannot) help to answer.
• Tuesday July 30: "Finding Relatives, Even When Dealing with Endogamy"
• If you're Jewish, you know that with autosomal DNA testing, you get lots of relatives who are predicted to be way more closely related than they actually are, because of endogamy.  I'll talk about why that is and how endogamy manifests itself in your results and how to determine which matches are worthwhile pursuing--and I'll show you some examples of how I've found relatives with autosomal DNA, in spite of dealing with endogamy.
• Wednesday July 31: "Finding Relatives in Russian Empire Records for non-Russian Speakers"
• There are more and more Russian Empire records coming online, but the vast majority of them haven't been indexed.  Most English speakers are intimidated by these records sets, even though they could have vast amounts of information about one's family.  This talk won't teach you to read Russian in an hour, but it will teach you how to identify where names will be in a record set to allow you to try to find your family in these record sets.  This is the first time I'll be presenting this talk, and I'm pretty excited about it!
• Thursday August 1: "Including and Beyond Vital Records - Resources Used Reconstructing a Family"
• When you're trying to research your family, there are a wide variety of resources that can be leveraged to built out a family's tree and understand this story.  But to do this, you need to understand changing borders in order to know where records for a family may be located.  There are a vast number of different types of records that can help reconstruct a family, and it's important to leverage as many as possible.  This talk shows how one large family's descendants were reconstructed with records kept in multiple modern-day countries and with many different types of records.  Thinking out of the box is critical!

I'll also be spending some time at the JewishGen booth, and I hope to attend lots of other talks.  Hope to see some of you in Cleveland!

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