During the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-1849), thousands of Irish families and individuals fled Ireland seeking a better life. This lecture will review the different resources to find your Irish emigrant ancestors in Canadian records including shipping records, quarantine databases, and online collections.
 

This lecture covers the basics of using DNA in Irish research. DNA testing companies and types of DNA are covered. Next, the process of creating ethnicity estimates is covered.  What to do with your list of matches is next followed by a case study using DNA. 

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. We will also discuss the historical context that transformed the region and influenced the lives of your ancestors.

This lecture discusses the history of Irish Immigration to Canada and sources of information such as passenger Lists and alternative records.  Next specific groups of settlers are covered such as the Halifax Irish, the Peter Robinson settlers, the Monaghan settlers, the Famine Irish. The role of emigrant aid societies is also covered, such as the Montreal Emigrant Society. 

Using case studies, this lecture introduces the Family Historian to cluster research for Irish Research.  Cluster Research involves identifying the ancestor’s FAN club: family, associates and neighbors.   

The 20th century was the age of the passenger list. Unlike the previous centuries, ship manifests from this time focused on the individual passengers and provide a goldmine of information for family historians. To fully understand and analyze passenger lists, we need to understand how they were created, what information is included, and what inferences can be made. This presentation will also discuss strategies for narrowing your search when a passenger list can’t be found and piecing together an entire family’s movements to the United States. 

Família! Learn the basics of Portuguese family history research. Our expert will discuss some of the common challenges in Portuguese research, review go-to records and resources, and demonstrate key search strategies.

This lecture looks at how to get started in researching your Italian ancestors by examining records generated in the U.S. and Italy and what is most important in effectively researching in Italian records. 

In this lecture, we will walk you through the beginning steps of German research: understanding waves of immigration to America, getting back to the immigrant generation, finding where in Germany your ancestors came from, and understanding the many German border changes pre- and post-unification.

This lecture will provide the basics on key terms you’re likely to encounter and how to decipher old German script—Kurrent/Sütterlin or "deutsche Schrift"—and German Gothic (Fraktur) font.