Treffen Tuesday

October – Maggie Hein, “Is This Really My Ancestor?”

Presentation:

Are you using genealogy web sites to research your Germans from Russia ancestors?  Is your family tree online?  The big genealogy web sites (Ancestry, Family Search, My Heritage) can be wonderful tools for locating records and making connections to your ancestors.  They can also offer you misleading, unproven and false information.  How do you sort out the good information from the bad?  What is unique about Germans from Russia research that results in so little accurate data online?

In this presentation we will talk about how to assess the accuracy of the genealogy data you find online.  We will discuss what records the big web sites have and more importantly what records they don’t have.  We will talk about the reliability of different types of sources and how to steer clear of unproven data.  The goal of this presentation is to give you the information you need to confidently use these web sites and accurately document your family history.

Biography:

Maggie Hein is a volunteer AHSGR Village Coordinator for the Volga German village of Frank. She is one of the administrators of the Volga Germans web site (www.volgagermans.org). Maggie’s genealogy research focuses on Germans who migrated to Russia in 1766 to settle in the lower Volga River region. She has used German church records to document hundreds of the German families who settled in Volga German Villages between 1763 and 1773, identifying previously unknown origin locations for many families. When she isn’t doing genealogy research, she is a tax accountant and co-owner of a CPA firm in the Chicago suburbs.