Seminar at Genealogical Society of Monroe County

My dad and I went to a one day seminar in Monroe, MI yesterday that was put on by the Genealogical Society of Monroe County.  We weren't sure what to expect, but the topics they had listed in the flyer intrigued us to register the $25 each for us and make the drive for the 9am-3:30pm day.  The day didn't disappoint.  The first half of the day was speaker, Kris Rzepczynski, from the Archives of Michigan in Lansing.  We learned so much what we could potentially find at the Archives of Michigan, that we can't wait to make our family research plan and spend a day there! We also learned a lot of what SeekingMichigan.org's website has to offer.  We have used the site before, but we don't realize how lucky we are to have this information free to us in Michigan.  Michigan is a unique state that is really getting on board in indexing and scanning records.  We also learned very soon, all naturalization records will be on the website soon, a huge score, because many times this lists the birthplaces such as cities of countries where our ancestors came from.

Next we had a male speaker named Jan (pronounced Yaan) Steven Zaleski speak about German and Polish research and emigration research tips from the Hamburg port.  We have a plethora of tools to try and trace my German roots (Kolb, Leimann surnames), although it's quite complex and requires a lot of time and digging.  The German information was overwhelming and the day ended perfectly, because I don't think I could have handled another minute of genealogy presentations.