Mary Kircher Roddy, CG, CGG

It’s hard to do genealogy well without studying your ancestors’ Friends & Family, Associates, and Neighbors - their FAN club. If your ancestors are Irish, you might have no luck at all without those FAN principles. But if you combine FAN club research with DNA, you might have just the winning ticket to get you back to your Irish ancestor’s origins. In this case study presentation, learn how focused research pointed the way from Ohio to townlands in County Mayo for an 1850s-era Irish immigrant.

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.

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.

Pasted front and center on page 1 of my great-grandmother's scrapbook was an illustration of a strikingly beautiful woman in an ostrich-plumed hat. Who was she and why was she there? No name, no date, no newspaper. Tiny bits of the page not glued down enabled me to discover clues to the paper's likely date and possible location and allowed me to discover the identity of my mystery woman. This case study illustrates what to do with an unknown, undated clipping and how to determine its origins.

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.

Take a trip with spreadsheets to the lands of your ancestors. Learn how spreadsheets can help as you learn to read foreign language newspapers. Use spreadsheets as a translation tool for your ancestors' vital and religious records. Create a spreadsheet to track your ancestors and those great ethnic or locality…

Learn 20+ tips for getting the most out of newspaper research. And discover the one name you need to look for in every obituary!

Indexes for county records are the key to finding deeds, probates and more. As FamilySearch digitizes more and more records, it's crucial to be familiar with different indexing systems and how to use them. The same skills are necessary for onsite courthouse and archive research. Learn about 15+ indexing systems...

Learn about some free databases that just might help you in your research.

The US Federal census and its “little brother,” the state census, are among the major workhorses of genealogical research. But are you getting the most out of them? This presentation presents 20+ tips for finding missing ancestors and mining the census for more clues for follow-up research.

Learn about the archives, libraries and repositories for genealogical records in the "other" Washington. Find out which special collection or digital archive will help you trace your roots in the Evergreen State. I'll cover a brief history of Washington state, a bit about the geography, ethnic influences, and where to…

FamilySearch.org has millions of images on its website, many of which are unindexed and not searchable. But if you know how to get into the catalog and browse around, you can find the unindexed images of birth and death certificates, naturalization papers, deeds, wills, estate inventories and more. Learn tricks…

First, learn about free sites, subscription sites and lesser-known ways for identifying and locating newspapers. Also learn strategies on searching for common surnames and forenames, as well as how to overcome the numerous spelling mistakes in newspaper searching. After understanding…

Sharing your family history can mean more than just writing a book. Sprinkle your ancestors into your daily life! Learn how to create jewelry, holiday ornaments and decorative items using ancestral photos and stories. When your friends and relatives see your ancestors they will want to know them, too.

Learn new ways to make data entry faster and easier and a few things that will make your spreadsheets more attractive. See how quickly Magic Fill will help you complete a list and watch Mary turn a spreadsheet "on it's ear to filp rows and columns. Learn how to "add"…

Spreadsheets can help you analyze your genealogy data and keep track of your research. In this webinar, Mary Roddy teaches how to use this powerful tool to gain perspective and further your genealogy research. You'll also learn how to quickly take search results from Familysearch and…

World War II is the earliest war where we can actually speak to the veterans themselves, the men and women who served, but this precious resource is fading quickly so time is of the essence! This webinar will present a case study, fleshing out a basic story of a pilot…

Are you afraid of spreadsheets because you don't know how or where to start? Or are you comfortable with spreadsheets but know there's a trick or two still to learn? In this webinar, Mary Kircher Roddy will get beginners up to speed, and share with experienced users tricks she's learned…

Bagging a live one is often a bigger rush than finding the dead ones. Bagging a live one who knows something about family history is gold. In this webinar Mary will show how you can find distant relatives, perhaps ones you never knew existed. Rather than trolling surname or location…