Janette Silverman began her adventure in genealogy, as so many do – to find answers to questions her relatives couldn’t or wouldn’t answer! Over 40 years ago, she and her dad began their search. That research led them first to expanding their knowledge of their families in the United States, and discovering their relationships to people they had long thought were “family friends.” Ultimately they found their ancestral families in Europe, discovered information about relatives who had been murdered in the Holocaust, and then to everyone’s surprise, found one branch of the family had survived.
Initially typing or scribbling notes on forms, they were grateful when they were able to save trees and accumulate their information digitally. A 1989 acquisition of the first version of Family Tree Maker put them on a path of organizing the data they were collecting. JewishGen appeared on the scene first as a newsgroup and later as a resource with indexes of millions of pages of records helped in her search. Those of you who do genealogical research know how easy it is for a hobby on which you spend a few hours a week to quickly take over your life, and that was what Janette experience. At first, spending a few hours on weekends, when that proved to be insufficient to feed the growing need to find out more she became more involved, not only in her own research, but working with the larger genealogical community. In 2005 she joined the volunteers at JewishGen, and expanded her professional roles in synagogue education to start teaching genealogy courses.
In 2013, Janette completed her Doctorate in Jewish Studies from Spertus Institute in Chicago. Her dissertation, In Living Memory detailed her research into four branches of her family, contextualizing their experiences in Eastern Europe and the United States into the milieu in which they lived. In August 2024, her book Stories The Never Told Us was published, and she became one of the Jewish Book Council Network’s 2025-2026 authors.
In 2015, Janette joined AncestryProGenealogists and her adventures in genealogy continued, this time with a team of talented researchers. Janette and her team research on site and use digital repositories from all over the world. She has researched on her own behalf and for clients onsite in England, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova, Romania, France, Israel, Canada, and all over the United States. Her research takes her into digital repositories from all over the world as she pursues clues to answer the never-ending questions that arise.
In addition to her research, Janette speaks at conferences, meetings, and family reunions in person and virtually, all over the world. She takes great pleasure in helping people discover their stories, and in doing so, find information about relatives they didn’t know, and to restore the names of those relatives to living memory.
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