Well, of course there are brick walls. But there are a number of search techniques and resources to check before you give up finding your great-grandfather’s birth record. This session reviews how to approach your search to discover records of elusive ancestors. Vital detail clues can be found in an array of archive resources, from primary Birth-Marriage-Death records to more esoteric documents. Examples are illustrated from the JRI-Poland.org massive collection of archival records in the Kielce-Radom-Sandomierz region of Poland, but the methodology can be mapped onto other resources in other lands.

Raised in New York, Judy Golan has lived in Israel for the past 30+ years with her husband, daughters and cats. She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving an MBA from UCLA, she worked for several years as a marketing executive and consultant both for high tech firms and her own company, On Target Marketing and Strategic Planning. Today she devotes extensive time as a JRI-Poland.org volunteer as the Area Coordinator for towns in the Kielce, Radom and Sandomierz regions as well as Town Leader for several towns. She is the founder of the genealogical consulting firm Find My Roots and was awarded the IIJG Tagger 2nd Prize 2015 for her paper, “Reading Between the Lines: Mining Jewish History Through Extraction of Polish Archive Data."