Minna and Ada Everleigh, Chicago’s most famous pair of sisters, fabricated many details of their lives in order to run their shady business. Learn to sort fact from fiction.

Before beginning their own research, good researchers seek out the research already done by others. Find out how to do an exhaustive search for books, periodicals, and other published or unpublished printed research material that may save you time in your own research.

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.

Data management is not just an organizing system. Data management is a critical analytical tool. Research standards tell us that conclusions must be supported by “proof.” Standards insist that “proof” is more than “a document”—rather, it’s a conclusion based on a body of evidence created by reasonably exhaustive research. Meeting this standard creates a paradox: The more data we gather, the more confused we get!—unless we maintain that body of evidence in a way that enables us to digest it, analyze it, and correlate it with everything else we’ve found. This session presents a framework for projects of all types and sizes, building on sound research practices that carry us smoothly from problem analysis to problem resolution.

Research reports are not just for professionals, but are a great tool for anyone who wants to answer their research questions. Write a research report to yourself to organize your thoughts, analyze the evidence, document your findings, and solve your puzzles. Using an example from the Netherlands, this presentation demonstrates how you can organize a research report to spot more clues in records, discover and resolve discrepancies, and build reliable conclusions.

From town planning to native relations, “Las Leyes de Las Indias” (Laws of the Indies) governed Spanish colonies of North America and beyond, and created unique records for research for anyone with ancestral ties to Spanish America.

Learn how research overcame the misleading records, surname changes, and frequent moves that concealed the identity of a woman whose beauty mesmerized seven men. This talk is based on the winning article of the 2017 National Genealogical Society’s Family History Writing Contest.

Stuck? It happens to everybody. So, how do successful genealogists “prime their pumps” when their research wells seem to go dry? This session offers a slew of sources, methods, fresh ideas, and case studies to recharge your innovation when you think both you and your opportunities are totally exhausted.

Researching in a native country is hard. Researching in Germany? Even harder. When every family in town shares a surname and all the sons are Johann Christoph or Gerhard, and all the daughters are Maria or Margarethe, how do we distinguish among them? What are the tools we can use to figure out which Johann Christoph is mine?