This summer has been stupendous and very exhausting. I’ve spoken at 3 weeklong conferences and feel like I’ve been flying across the country non-stop. In reality it hasn’t been non-stop, every place I visited I stay at for a week and there was about a week or so of downtime between each conference. Nevertheless, I was in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Being at each conference was energizing – the exhaustion only crept in afterwards.

I didn’t realize through those long years of COVID isolation, how much I missed of in-person gatherings. Most of the talks I do are still virtual, but these in-person conferences do have opportunities that are difficult to find online. Most of all there are those serendipitous meetings with old friends and new.

Even though I’m done with in-person appearances for the summer, it doesn’t mean that I can rest. First, of course, I am working full-time with a magnificent team of researchers at AncestryProGenealogists https://www.progenealogists.com/our-experts and just celebrated my 9th work anniversary. I feel really privileged to be working with so many incredbily talented researchers.

Then I have prep work revising previously delivered presentations, creating new ones, and yes, even doing some of my own research. Up-coming presentations include one in mid-September about a family that settled in Michigan, in November I’ll be doing a session for Yad Vashem on using JewishGen, February finds me speaking to a Boston-bassed presentation on record complexities in Galicia, Austrian Empire. Of course there are more, those were only the ones that came to mind quickly.

My own research included an amazing find this week from a clue at https://larasgenealogy.blogspot.com/ about World Ward II era Alien Registration documents that were moved to NARA. I just had to go and see what this was about. So I searched the index with various surnames of my own ancestors. Most of the names were too common for me to easily identify relatives, but one fairly (I was going to say relatively but I changed my mind) uncommon yielded treasure, and I found what I think will be my great-grandmother’s AR-2 file. I ordered it and now I wait.

Waiting and researching after my book just came out are dangerous – I keep finding new documentation to expand my tree, and wish I knew some of this previously – I would have added it to the book! No, I’m not thinking of a sequel – my next project “Voyage of the Forgotten” is well underway!

The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and through 39,000 other distributors!

People keep asking me if the cover photo is of my family, and the answer is yes – early 1920s in Brooklyn, New York, just before a Passover seder began!