Bagging a Live One – Connecting with Cousins You Never Knew You Had

Connecting with living relatives can unveil a treasure trove of family history beyond the confines of documents and records. Are you making the most of these living links to your past? Join Lisa Lisson for an exploration of MyHeritage's potent tools, designed to help you build bridges with relatives and unearth precious family memories. From initiating heartfelt conversations to orchestrating virtual family reunions, this session arms you with a toolkit to cherish and deepen intergenerational connections. Walk away with a newfound ability to weave your family's living stories into your historical tapestry.

Learn tips to locate living relatives for collaboration, DNA testing, and more!

Finding descendants and searching collateral lines of your family history is very rewarding and provides many otherwise unknown details to your family story as the methodology of conducting this type of research is taught. Focus is given to provide actual case study of doing this kind of research.

Learn the techniques that Private Investigators use to track down missing people. These strategies will help you find those elusive living relatives who just may hold the key to your brick wall or possess that treasured photo you've been looking for.

Charles Olin disappeared from his Nebraska roots about 1908. The DNA in the descendant of an out-of-wedlock child born in 1919 point to Charles as the father, but no records place him there. This case study proves the alternate identity Charles used for 40 years.

A family from Ireland emigrated in a chain migration scheme to western Pennsylvania between 1825 and 1845. See how using the standards for researching connected the siblings and their descendants and led to their origins in County Tyrone.

Tracking the woman who raised Jane’s youngest child leads from California through England to County Tyrone to identify parents. An Irish family case study. Brief Outline Jane Graham was born in Ireland in 1835. Unsourced family lore provided parents’ names. Twenty years of on-and-off research proved the lore was true. Jane and her husband and children were missed in the 1860 census. Her only census appearance was 1870, three years before her death in childbirth. Encountering Jane’s last child another family’s household led to extensive research on Ann Lockren and the discovery that Ann and Jane were sisters. Research on Irish-born Ann led to records of her marriage and children in County Durham, England. After Ann was widowed, she lived in the same household as another Graham family. Tracking those Grahams through clues in family trees to records in England and Ireland led to origins in County Tyrone. Catholic parish registers in Tyrone proved Jane and Ann were sisters, and who their parents were. Case involves multiple surname variants and use of cluster research.

Using case studies of identity shifts, learn strategies to discover who the young man became in later life, or who Great-grandpa was before you got to know him.

Many 19th- and early 20th-century German language newspapers were printed in a Fraktur font. And not only that, they were written in a foreign language! This combination of an archaic font and a foreign language creates two significant hurdles for the 21st century genealogist, perhaps with limited foreign language skills, to overcome. But don’t despair. Modern technology has provided solutions. Learn how to "crack the code" and discover where your favorite newspaper sites have hidden the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text. Translation tools will quickly make those foreign words readable for even the most die-hard English-only speaker.