General Meeting - With election of officers and sharing

Presenter: Anna Marie Scott  Anna Marie Scott is a geographer and GIS enthusiast who believes maps are a powerful way to tell stories about places and people. She will be drawing from her experience creating maps and educational resources to share how maps can be valuable tools for genealogy research, helping visualize the paths and locations of ancestors. 

Anna Marie Scott recently earned her master's degree in Geography from the University of Northern Iowa, where she studied GIS, cartographic design, and spatial data analysis.  

Presenter Megan Klein-Hewett

Presenter: Bonnie Norman

Presenter Sue Schlichting  You are so excited to share the latest discovery with family, only to get a less than enthusiastic response. Learn how to creatively share and pass on your genealogical research and heirlooms to your family, including the reluctant ones!

Sue Schlichting of Pursuing Your Past, grew up on the family farm in Eastern Nebraska. She has over 30 years of research experience. Her expertise is in Midwestern research with an emphasis in German and Swedish records.

Sue enjoys sharing her passion for family history and seeks out creative ways to preserve and share family artifacts and stories with the non-genies in her family.

Sue Schlichting has been a professional genealogist since 2018. She is a graduate of the ProGen Study course, a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, National Genealogical Society and Daughters of the American Revolution. She volunteers her time as the local church historian, editor of her family’s annual newsletter and serves on the Outreach committee for the Greater Omaha Genealogical Society.

Sue is a genealogist, speaker, teacher and coach.

Presenter Jill Morelli  Author of Journeys of the Forgotten The Orphans of Hamilton County, Iowa.

In the fall of 1890, 46 orphans from New York City arrived in Webster City, Iowa. The newspapers never revealed their names. Jill Morelli spent 2.5 years trying to identify them, and their biological parents with mixed results. The children were rarely adopted, rarely included in the family’s generational wealth and most carried their childhood trauma into their adult years.  In spite of limited access to information a total of 36 orphans were initially identified. The Orphan Train Movement, as it is now called, is often described as a program that rescued children from the despair of the big city, but was it as successful as the stories would imply?. Jill will share the development of the book, the research techniques used to accomplish the goals. Journeys of the Forgotten is available at lulu.com, Amazon and from your favorite independent bookstore.

Jill Morelli, CG, CGL, writes and lectures nationally, and is the founder of the award-winning Certification Discussion Group, an online class which demystifies BCG certification. She self-publishes and is working on her third book. Jill is program chair of the Puget Sound-Association of Professional Genealogists and a past president of the Seattle Genealogical Society.

Presenter Kathy Meade Using ArkivDigital ArkivDigital revolutionizes Swedish genealogy by offering millions of high-resolution color images of historical records. While the platform hosts everything from military rolls and passenger manifests to aerial maps, this presentation dives deep into its most valuable resource: Swedish church books. Discover how to navigate these rich archives with ease, and learn how ArkivDigital’s powerful, modern search indexes can help you break through genealogical brick walls faster than ever before.

Kathy Meade is the North American representative for ArkivDigital, a company that offers online access to newly photographed color images of Swedish church books and other historical records. She has been working with Swedish genealogy for over twenty years. Ms. Meade serves on the advisory board for the Swedish American Genealogy Research Center at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago. She volunteers at the Swedish American Museum in Chicago and the Arlington Heights Memorial Library in Arlington Heights, IL, helping patrons with their Swedish genealogical research.

Presenter Daniel Horowitz With billions of records at your disposal, where do you even begin? The MyHeritage Search Engine is a state-of-the-art tool that can help you search for information about your relatives online. In a matter of seconds, it can search across billions of XXX historical records to pinpoint the ones most relevant to your research. Its advanced algorithms can identify spelling and phonetic variations, understand nicknames, and handle synonyms and ethnic variations. Daniel will show you how to use the MyHeritage Search Engine to find information about your relatives quickly and efficiently.

Daniel Horowitz is the Genealogy Expert at MyHeritage, providing key contributions liaising with genealogy societies, bloggers and media, as well as lecturing, and attending conferences around the world. Dedicated to Genealogy since 1986, he was the teacher and the study guide editor of the family history project "Searching for My Roots" in Venezuela for 15 years. Daniel is involved in several crowdsource digitization and transcription projects and holds a board level position at the Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA).

Presenter Jeremy Best Genealogy in Germany