CLASSES AND SPEAKER BIOS

CLASS DESCRIPTIONS:

SPEAKER BIOS:

Cynthia Wilson is a native of Washington, D.C. with ancestral roots in Patrick County Virginia and Alamance County North Carolina. More than 14 years ago, it was suggested that she do a photo family history. Since that time, Cynthia has published several articles for AAGHS Journal, participated in television productions on genealogy, was the keynote speaker at Patrick County Historical Society’s Black History Month event, instructed classes in Discover Your Roots II & II Workshops and Family Expos, and assisted many individuals from all other the US with their research. She presently holds the position of Chair of the Black Genealogy Research Group of Seattle.

For the past several years, Cynthia has concentrated her genealogy education on slave research and Civil War Pension Records.  She has been very successful in her own slave research – finding and documenting 20 owners in both her direct line and collateral families.

Dave Thaler has been a Family History Center staff member for several years and is one of the co-chairmen for these Family History Expos.  Dave is the historian for the Thaler family organization, and has published a book "The Thaler Family in Germany and North America, 1655-1995", containing the ancestors and descendants of the family that immigrated to Canada in 1830.   Over the years, Dave has taught several classes in German, US Census and Internet research.  He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Dave has traveled to Germany to visit the Thaler ancestral home, although most of his other lines go back to early New England settlers.  He collects books on royal ancestry of New England immigrants, and maintains a web site on a number of lines to make available which have been accepted and which have been disproved.

Dawn Cerasuolo is a staff member at the Redmond Family History Center and has been for the last 3 years.  She is a specialist in helping new family historians enter data into computer programs.  She also assists patrons with Internet and microfilm research.  Dawn has loads of group teaching experience and has taught various topics for beginners in many areas.  Dawns truly enjoys watching the “lightbulbs go off” for new students.

Half of Dawn’s family tree is rooted in Berks County, Pennsylvania while the other half is firmly planted on the Delaware peninsula.  Dawn has had the opportunity to visit her family’s ancestral haunts in Redding, Pennsylvania.  She spent much of her time there rummaging through cracking court records and visiting churches and cemeteries.

DearMYRTLE is the nom de plume of Pat Richley, author of "The Everything Online Genealogy Book" (2001) and "DearMYRTLE's Joy of Genealogy" (2006).  Myrt is a retired software instructor, has written an free online genealogy column since 1995, and regularly contributes to Everton's Genealogical Helper Magazine. Myrt has served as the instructor of the Manasota PAF Users Group since 1992 and as the Patron Services Librarian at the Bradenton, FL Family History Center.  She cut her genealogical teeth at the National Archives, Library of Congress and the DAR Library in Washington, DC. Myrt has recently returned from teaching and speaking at the Northern Utah Family History Conference & Symposium.  Myrt also taught and spoke at MyAncestorsFound.com family history jamborees in St. George, Utah and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Pat is a Daughter of Utah Pioneers on 7 lines, a Daughter of Union Veterans on 3 lines, and is currently documenting her lineage for her Daughters of the American Revolution application.   Fortunately Pat's daughters live in Salt Lake City, which facilitates frequent visits to the Family History Library, where she has logged over 750 hours of research during the past ten years.

Delores Davis has been teaching computer classes for many years at SeniorNet of Puget Sound and Mercer Island Community Center in Mercer. She has written  “The Male Connection,” “God’s blessing to me” (1995), her personal autobiography “Turning Stumbling Blocks into Stepping Stones” (2000).  Delores wrote these books for her children and their children and then developed a class for this purpose which is still being taught today .

When her youngest child said he didn’t remember his father ever working, Delores knew the legacy of hard work and endurance needed to be  written down.  Her husband had his first heart attack when their son was 4, became disabled, and died when their son was 6.  Delores expanded this legacy with an inspirational book of quotes, sayings and humor entitled “A Book of Entertaining and Enlightening Words”.

Denney Pugmire is a staff member at the Factoria Family History Center.  He has completed some 6,000 hours of genealogical activities in the last four years.   His activities include original and internet research, name-clearing, submission, database clean-up and memorabilia scanning.  He has a database of 140,000 ancestors and finds PAF very adequate to search and manipulate the data.  Denney also has a huge collection of historical photographs.

Don Doud is a Spanish interpreter/translator for the Washington State Dept. of Social and Health Services, King County Courts, Federal Way Public Schools, and other organizations.  Don has diligently researched his father’s family line which led Don to previously researched Doud genealogy. He is an adjunct professor at City University for over 12 years and enjoys solving mysteries and tracking things down.

Don is a native of Seattle, but his ancestors came from England,  They arrived in America in the 1600’s, fought in the Revolutionary War, came through Ohio and South Dakota to eventual end up in Washington. Along the way, they picked up French Canadians working for the Hudson’s Bay Co. and Native Americans in from Eastern Washington.

Gary Zimmerman is a fourth-generation resident of Seattle, and officer in the Pioneer Association of the State of Washington and the President of the Fiske Genealogical Foundation.  Gary's work in genealogy began with a 5th grade assignment and his exploration of family history has been continuous since that time.  In the early 1960's he began teaching other people how to do genealogy.  Today, most of his work is through the instructional programs of the Fiske Foundation and in supervising the responses to genealogical questions asked of the Pioneer Hall organizations.

Gary's family tree traveled from Germany to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Iowa, and then to the gold camps in the California Sierra.  Along the way, they picked up some Welsh and Scottish genes.  Gary's ancestors also hail from England and New Jersey with a slow move down the Eastern shore of Delaware and Maryland, and out to Minnesota with the French Canadians.  All this before 1875, when Gary's family landed at the south end of Lake Union in Seattle and haven't moved since.

Godfrey Ellis is a Family History Consultant in Lacey, Washington.  He has been tracing his genealogy and English family roots, off and on, since adolescence.  Dr. Ellis recently presented on English genealogy at the Washington State conference on Family History and has lectured on several cruise ships - he and his wife Merry have sailed in the Caribbean, up to Alaska, and to Hawaii giving presentations on this addiction we call family history.

Not everyone is descended from royalty and famous figures, someone has to be descended from the commoners.  Dr. Ellis has been working on a series of fact-based fictional accounts of several of his family lines embedding his ancestors in their personal and their social history.  With dialogue and description, He hopes his books hook the next generations onto family history.  

Jim Terry is the Webmaster, Newsgroup Administrator and Customer Support Representative for Millennia Corporation, which produces the Legacy Family Tree genealogy program.  He majored in genealogical research at Brigham Young University.  After graduation, he worked as a professional genealogist in Salt Lake City, but eventually pursued a career in public relations and photography.  In 1996, Jim returned to college to study computer networks and database management. 

Jim does professional research for a small number of favored clients.  He has written published articles on the use of the Internet and Scottish church records.  In addition he has spoken to a number of genealogical societies and groups in Illinois, Wisconsin, California, Utah and Washington.

Julie Monson is a staff member at the Bellevue Family History Center.  Julie knew she was hooked on genealogy in 1983 when she used the time her son was in kindergarten to go to the nearby National Archives to search census records!  Since then, she has enjoyed learning computer skills to digitize her family history and collect favorite web sites where she’s found several lost ancestors.  Historical newspapers are one of her favorite tools to learn more about the lives her ancestors experienced. 

Julie has taught school and private piano, and has enjoyed presenting lessons on beginning genealogy to women’s groups and at family reunions.  She enjoys helping beginners, and learning research tips from other patrons.

Kaylene Thaler is a staff member at the Redmond Family History Center.  She has been involved in family history for many years and always has good ideas on how to find missing ancestors.  Kaylene also has years of group teaching experience and is very thorough in covering a topic.  Last year while becoming an expert in US land records for the Expo, Kaylene studied and attended FGS/UGA conferences to keep current with new resources and techniques for land record research.

Kaylene's own family history required her to prove that there were two cousins with the same name living in different parts of the country, not just one person as was widely published in books and on the Internet.  Last year, Kaylene taught the first detailed how-to class for land record research and she is back by popular demand.

Kevin Kelly [bio to be added]

Leslie Edmunds has taught classes at Family History Centers and Expo's around the area.  Her areas of expertise include US Research from 2000 to 1800, on-line sourcing, ancestor profiling, data compilation and next step evaluation.  Leslie works on many others' family trees and enjoys helping them catch the family history bug.  Plagued by insomnia, Leslie's latest wee hours of the morning craze is combining old school methods with new school technology to find people fast.

Leslie's own family tree touches Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Canada and many other foreign lands.  She's all across the US in all time periods and has spent hours on-line in creative census searches.  US/Canadian immigration and "pond-hopping" seem to be her next step in developing research expertise. 

Marcella Murri [bio to be added]

Margaret Robe Summit leads an ongoing workshop at the Sno-Isle Genealogical Society in breaking through brick walls.  In addition, she lectures on genealogical subjects throughout the Puget Sound region and leads a monthly discussion group at the Lynnwood Senior Center.  Margaret has applied her Ph.D. in English to research and writing for The Sounder, the SIGS research quarterly, of which she is editor.  She has been involved in genealogical education for about the past twenty years.

Margaret recently traveled to West Virginia to be the featured speaker at the Robe family reunion.  She maintains a database of descendants of her 3rd great-grandfather, William Robe.  Margaret is related to both Presidents Bush and to astronaut John Glenn.  An article about Margaret will appear in the Everett Herald early in October.      

Marge Reid is webmaster of the Sno-Isle Genealogical Society, the coordinator for the Snohomish County USGenWeb website, the manager for the Germans in Boston Resource Center website and the REIDs in PEI Single Surname Study website.  She also serves as staff librarian for the Sno-Isle Genealogical Society at the Humble House and as staff member at the Shoreline Family History Center.  In her spare time, Marge is putting together a Snohomish County gazetteer and the 1915 Everett City School District census to published on-line. 

All of Marge's ancestors came to Boston and stayed there.  Half of these immigrants ancestors never owned property or wrote a will.  So, it was off to Boston city directories to fill in a lot of blank spaces in their life stories, and provide clues for using more obscure sources of information for these big city dwellers.

Merry Ellis is a Family History Consultant in Lacey, Washington and has been fascinated with her family history for many years.  She has spent many days conducting research on pilgrim lines in the family history library in Salt Lake City.  Merry has visited England several times for purposes of learning more about her and her husband's family histories.  Along with her husband Godfrey Ellis, she has also lectured on genealogy on cruise ships to Alaska and other exotic locales.

Related to the same Mayflower pilgrim fathers as Joseph Smith and Winston Churchill, Merry has family lines extended to England, France, Germany, and French-Canada. 

Nicolette Bromberg is the Curator of Visual Materials at the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections (since Dec 2000). Previously she was the Curator of Visual Materials at the Wisconsin Historical Society (in charge of about 3 million photographs, films, and graphic materials) where she helped develop the H.H. Bennett Photography Studio Historical Site.  Before that she was the first Photo-Archivist for the University of Kansas, Kansas Collection regional history archive.

Nicolette's family history is quintessential American.  She's got a little bit of everything such as Germans who fought in the Revolutionary War, Irish who left Ireland during the Potato Famine, Immigrants from Eastern Europe and a first generation American, her father.

Orin Wells, a computer scientist by trade, is a founder and president of the Wells Family Research Association, an international organization of family researchers of the Wells surname.  He coordinates the Wells DNA Project that was started in 2000 and is still the largest single surname DNA project with over 400 participants world-wide.  Orin is also a longstanding member of the Guild Of One Name Studies and a member of the DNA Advisory Panel for the Guild.

He will be making a presentation on the use of DNA for genealogical purposes and the basics for setting up DNA projects.

Sandra Y. Hilton has conducted several workshops for genealogy conferences locally and nationally.  She is an expert in technology and how it can be used to enhance genealogy research.  Sandra enjoys teaching people how to create Family History websites and make genealogy research easy to transport.  She is also skilled in electronic preservation of everything including audio interviews.  This year, Sandra is branching out into surname research, particularly origins and histories.

Sandra is originally from Monroe, Michigan where 95% of the African American population is related to her.  From a very young age, Sandra had an interest in her family history.  Her father used to tell her bedtime stories that include family members and their lives or escapades.  Officially, Sandra began her research in 1985 and since that time, has managed to research back 6 generations on her father's/paternal side of the family (Taylor).  At family gatherings, Sandra is usually quizzing them all on their roots and makes a game out of it so that everyone is excited about participating.

Sarah Thorson Little is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and been a Professional Genealogist for 30 years. She has been the lead instructor at the University of Washington Certificate Program in Genealogy & Family History since 1989, and is also an instructor in family history and computer research at North & South Seattle Community Colleges. Ms. Thorson Little has specialized research expertise in Northwest Native Americans, Norwegian, 19th & 20th Century U.S. research and Washington State.

Sarah has been interested in family research since a young child.  By the age of 14, she had been to every state in the United States at least twice, visiting historical landmarks and battlefields with her history professor father. She has since researched throughout the United States and in Europe visiting and researching in courthouses and archives in all areas where her known ancestors have lived.

Steve Morrison is the past President of the Olympia Genealogical Society where he chaired three spring seminars and was the Speakers Chair for the 2006 WSGS Conference.  Since 1992 family history has been Steve's second profession.  In 1998 he privately published "Glad Our Paths Crossed", a remembrance of his grandmother WALTZ which is now part of a millennium time capsule on the State Capitol Campus.  Steve is a frequent speaker at his local society and was an adjunct faculty at the Evergreen State College for several years.

Steve's areas of interest are Western Outlaws, Oregon Trail, Ireland and Quaker research.