Jewish Genealogical Society Upcoming Meetings

by Charles Hansen

From Matches in a List to Family: Case Studies in DNA” “by Mary Kathryn Kozy, Genealogical Lecturer

DATE:  Monday, December 11, 2017

LDS Factoria Building
4200 124th Ave SE
Bellevue, WA  98006

   Doors open at 6:30 p.m., for all to enjoy the extensive JGSWS Library’s genealogical resources!

   Free Wi-Fi available

  Presentation starts promptly at 7:15 p.m.

  Free admission and refreshments

ABOUT OUR PROGRAM:  As more and more people decide to DNA test, the bigger our match lists become! With somewhere close to eight million people in the test pool amongst the four major companies, we have many more matches to deal with. What does one DO with them all? How can we organize them? What are the best practices for sorting them out, especially when dealing with endogamous populations? This lecture will focus somewhat on the use of various tools at the DNA testing companies, but will also deal with several case studies in actually finding the relationships between various unknown individuals. What if the DNA match has no tree? Is it hopeless? Absolutely not! Come learn some tips and techniques for taking those matches and turning them into family.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER:   Mary Kathryn Kozy has been working on her own family history for over 35 years. She has researched families from the Midwest to the Deep South and from both Western and Eastern Europe. She has served in multiple positions in several local societies and on the state level. She currently serves on the board of the JGSWS, serves as a part-time LDS Family History missionary, and speaks to many groups in the area. Mary is married, the mother of three wonderful children and two grandchildren. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both Zoology and Information Technology & Systems and has completed three certificate programs with the National Institute for Genealogical Studies. She has also completed the ProGen program with an eye toward certification as a professional genealogist.

“Reclaim The Records: Genealogy Fought the Law and Won” (How to Use State Freedom of Information Laws for Genealogy) , presented by Brooke Schreier Ganz

DATE:  Monday, January 8, 2018

LDS Factoria Building
4200 124th Ave SE
Bellevue, WA  98006

    Doors open at 6:30 p.m., for all to enjoy the extensive JGSWS Library’s genealogical resources!

    Free Wi-Fi available

   Presentation starts promptly at 7:15 p.m.

   Free admission and refreshments

ABOUT OUR PROGRAM:  Tired of being told by state and local archives and government agencies that your family’s genealogical records are “unavailable” to the public or only available if you visit them onsite? We were too, so we figured out what to do about it. We’re Reclaim The Records, a new activist group that filed a first-of-its-kind Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) legal petition in the Supreme Court of New York against the NYC Municipal Archives in order to access to twentieth century genealogical records…and won! We also secured the first-ever public release of the indices to hundreds of thousands of vital records from the New Jersey State Archives. And we’re filing many more requests against city and state agencies, large and small. This presentation will tell the story behind these cases, walk through the legal basics of FOIL, and teach genealogists how to file their own FOIL requests for their own records.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER:  Brooke Schreier Ganz is the founder of Reclaim The Records, a not-for-profit activist group that uses state Freedom of Information requests to return genealogical records to the public. As the former Vice President of Gesher Galicia, she designed and built their website, including its innovative “All Galicia Database”. The underlying search engine codebase, named “LeafSeek,” was released by Brooke as a free open source project, for which she won second place in the 2012 RootsTech Developer Challenge. She further refined it to build the bilingual “All Israel Database” for the Israel Genealogical Research Association (IGRA). She lives in California