We are thrilled to introduce you to one of the dynamic speakers teaching at our 2016 Family History Conference in Dallas Texas on October 28-30! Registration opened September 1st...grab your spot now!
About the Speaker
Bernard is an amateur genealogist and popular lecturer based in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. He began researching his family over 25 years ago and enjoys sharing lessons learned from those experiences, including his mistakes. Although he knew only one grandparent (his maternal grandfather) he has successfully identified all of his great-great grandparents and several triple- and quadruple-great grandparents in Ireland and Germany. He is the president and social media chair of the Mid-Cities Genealogical Society, and is a member of the National Genealogical Society and the Texas State Genealogical Society.
Bernard is retired from the National Weather Service Southern Region Headquarters where he was the Chief of the Science & Training Branch. He is certified as a consulting meteorologist by the American Meteorological Society and holds a teaching certificate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He has taught at the Universities of Texas, Oklahoma and St. Thomas (Houston). Bernard earned a B.S. in physics/German from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Hawaii.
Presenter Sessions
Finding German Ancestors: Their Information Is Not All on the Internet
To locate records about your family in Germany it is essential to determine their home town through an exhaustive search of U.S. records, since most German records are maintained at the local level (town or parish). Also, due to wars and boundary changes your family’s records may now be located in another state or country. In this presentation I will demonstrate the use of finding aids to identify where civil and church records might be located, and online resources for correspondence and reading/interpreting German printing and handwriting.
Mining the Gems in a Civil War Pension File
What originally began as a limited regime of protections for soldiers, widows, and orphans, eventually morphed into a system of old age pensions for almost one third of the elderly population. Union Army veterans and their dependents applied to the federal government for a pension, while Confederate veterans applied to the state in which they resided. In this presentation I will use the files of two ancestors to demonstrate how to locate a pension file, and show some of the genealogical gems that can be found in it, such as: affidavits, depositions of witnesses, birth records, marriage and death certificates, and other supporting papers.
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