Crossing the Ocean: Finding Your Family

Most of us know our grandparents’ names and perhaps a bit beyond that, but the idea of crossing the ocean to find your ancestral history may seem daunting.  With many records now available on-line, you can often trace your family from the comfort of your home. Susan Weinberg will show how to work from US records back to records overseas, unlocking the many resources that will assist you in that journey. Using examples from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus, she invites you to join her as she connects immigrants to the US  back to their family in Eastern and Central Europe, identifying ancestral towns and the community of relationships that they left behind. Sourcing both US records and records from Europe, she will weave them together to learn the story that connects them. 

Susan Weinberg is an artist, writer and professional genealogist. She enjoys solving puzzles and telling stories and genealogy offers her many opportunities to do so. Weinberg serves as President of the Minnesota Jewish Genealogical Society (MNJGS) and is on the board of the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest. She is the author of We Spoke Jewish: A Legacy in Stories, a book based on the stories of Jewish elders in Minnesota. Her research has taken her to archives and ancestral towns in Poland, Belarus, the Ukraine and Lithuania as well as to Holocaust records in Germany. As a volunteer with Jewishgen.org, she creates websites on ancestral towns and can often be found photographing tombstones in the overgrown cemeteries in Eastern Europe.