Created by Kyle Hurst, Senior Genealogist of the Newbury Street Press

Published: November 2022

PDF Download, 10 pages

The Huguenots were French Protestants persecuted by a staunchly Catholic government. Thousands fled France in the 16th and 17th centuries seeking refuge across Europe, Africa, and North America including areas of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. Join Senior Genealogist Rhonda R. McClure to learn more about these religious refugees, where they came from and where they settled in America, and how to research them using several published resources.

Scots have been migrating to and settling in America and Canada for centuries. Today, there are an estimated 25 million Americans of Scottish descent. Tracing your Scottish heritage is rewarding, but not without its challenges. Join Chief Genealogist David Allen Lambert to learn the first steps in tracing your Scottish roots.

Lithuanians have been immigrating to America since as early as the 17th century. Yet, rapidly changing boundaries, unfamiliar languages, and late civil registration are just some of the challenges faced by family historians trying to trace their Lithuanian roots. In this online lecture and syllabus, Genealogist James Heffernan provides you with a better understanding of the waves of immigration to the United States, what types of records exist, and how to get started in Lithuanian family history research.

Every family historian wants to visit their ancestral homestead. Changing street names, landscapes, and boundaries can make this task difficult. This online lecture will discuss resources for identifying an ancestor’s address and provide practical skills for finding its current-day location using land deeds, maps, surveys, directories, and other records.

While we might wish all our ancestors’ records were typed in a standard format and perfectly legible, that simply isn’t the case. Many of the records family historians turn to are handwritten and may be faded, use archaic terminology, unfamiliar abbreviations, or are just plain illegible.

The first Scandinavians arrived in North America nearly 1,000 years ago on Viking ships. Today, an estimated 11 million Americans have Scandinavian ancestry. This webinar will provide an introduction to essential records, repositories, and strategies for exploring your Scandinavian roots, focusing on Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. You’ll learn how to address challenges in Scandinavian research including language barriers, common names, patronymic surnames, name changes, and more.

When it comes to researching your Jewish ancestry, it is not just a matter of researching your ancestors as it can be in other situations. Instead, you must have a working knowledge of different countries and their laws in regard to civil registration, military service and more. An understanding of where Jews were allowed to reside and how they were recorded is also necessary.

In his 2016 best-seller, The Stranger in My Genes: A Memoir