Friday, November 28, 2014
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Judy Williams of the Genealogy Society gave advice and answered questions at the genealogy discussion meeting hosted by the Austintown library.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Attendees of the genealogy discussion group gathered at a table for the meeting at the Austintown library.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Main library government documents librarian Kathy Richter prepared the overhead projector for the genealogy discussion group's meeting at the Austintown library.
By TIM CLEVELAND
What was perhaps the final meeting of the genealogy discussion group took place on Oct. 23 at the Austintown library.
The meetings took place once a month during the summer, and will only continue at the Main library if enough people want to keep it going.
“Everybody brings in the research they’ve been doing or want to start and ask Judy Williams from the Genealogy Society,” Main library government documents librarian Kathy Richter said. “She’s a fountain of information; she’s helped a lot of people. This one woman was looking for her African heritage and Judy was able to tell her a lot of what sites to go to that none of us knew about.
“Another woman hit a roadblock in looking for her family because her grandfather was married three times and they didn’t know it, so she now has found all these relatives that she didn’t know she had.”
Richter said the meetings are open discussion and advice is given to anyone who needs it.
“I’m not the expert,” she said. “I have a history degree and a library degree and I’m interested in this, but it’s not my field of expertise. I’m just kind of mediating the meetings and it’s an open discussion.”
Richter said some good web sites for researching genealogy include ancestry.com, familysearch.com and ancestry’s Ellis Island section, which has records taken from immigrants when they arrived in New York.
Richter said she has been doing some research on her family’s history as well.
“A lot of it is curiosity,” she said. “I know for myself, growing up I asked my mother about her grandparents, who were Irish. She didn’t even know their names. So, curiosity kills the cat, I’ve always wanted to know about them. Now, I finally have the time to start researching that.”
Richter said that TV shows can make the process seem a lot simpler than it is. She added that once researchers hit a certain point, they may have to travel to gain access to records not available online.
“A lot of people have become interested because of the shows on TV like ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ ” she said. “Unfortunately, people think it’s really easy like on TV. They don’t understand that the show has done months and months of research with a lot of money involved in it. They just think they’re going to get on Ancestry and find everything and it doesn’t work that way.”