When It Takes a Village: Applying Cluster Research Techniques

Researching our ancestors involves not only finding their origins, tracking them through different times and places, and viewing them in their social context, but also looking at their relatives, associates, and neighbors. This presentation shows how to apply cluster and collateral research techniques to your genealogical research problems. Topics include research planning, commonly used resources and documents, and a case study following individuals’ migrations from Europe to the U.S., overcoming name and residence changes, and using DNA evidence.

Emily’s handout

Conflict Management: Evaluating Evidence of Identity

In our family research, the records we seek do not always cooperate. Records may be wrong, or records may lie. We need to understand how records were created and how to corroborate their information with information from other sources. How did our ancestors interact with record-generating authorities? This talk presents a case study in gathering, evaluating, and analyzing evidence from U.S. records. Techniques of evidence analysis in the U.S. may help us with more challenging research in the old country.

Emily’s handout

Bio:
Emily H. Garber specializes in Jewish genealogical research and has worked with records from both Eastern European and German Jewish immigrants.  She holds a certificate from Boston University’s Genealogical Research Program. She chairs the Jewish Genealogy Group in Phoenix, Arizona, is a board member of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society, and has been a leader with the JewishGen Ukraine and Romanian Research Groups.  She writes a genealogy blog, https://extrayad.blogspot.com/and speaks at many genealogy conferences.