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Topic #1 - 'Forensic Genealogy - CSI Meets Roots'

'Who? What? When? Where?' Are these the words of a genealogist researching his family tree or a forensic scientist solving a mystery? Maybe someone who is 'both'!

Forensic Genealogy has opened a new world to genealogists, offering amazing new ways to research even conventional materials. Photographs, databases, and DNA can provide much more information than you ever
dreamed, if only you keep your eyes open and use a little imagination. Genealogy is now a wide-open field where anyone can make use of modern scientific techniques to investigate his family history.

Forensic Genealogy offers a new set of tools for investigating genealogical mysteries, emphasizing the creative parts of an investigation over the mechanics.

We live in an amazing world with so much information at our fingertips thanks to the internet. If you cannot find something online, you can reach out to genealogists all over the world for lookups and advice. But
are you really using these resources to your best advantage? Are you really getting all you can from your genealogical materials?

The goal of this lecture is not to give you a dry list of places to look for information, but rather to spark your imagination to discover new ways of looking at your family mysteries, to permanently change the way
you see things, to turn / you/ into a forensic genealogist.

“Colleen Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., is the author of two of the best-selling books in genealogy. Forensic Genealogy has been widely recognized for its innovative forensic science approach to genealogical research. She has been featured on NPR’s Talk of the Nation radio program (July 2005), and has written cover articles for Internet Genealogy (June 2006), Family Tree Magazine (April 2006) and Family Chronicle (October 2005). Colleen writes a regular column for Ancestry magazine.”

Colleen’s work has been very much in the news during the past few weeks as a result of a project to identify human remains found at the site of a DC-4 airliner that crashed on March 12, 1948. As a result of this project, the remains were identified as belonging to Francis Joseph Van Zandt, a 36-year-old merchant marine from Roanoke, Virginia. The story was picked up by hundreds of newspapers.

Topic #2 -'A Different Kind of DNA Talk'

DNA is not as difficult to understand as you might think! Whether you are having trouble spelling DNA or you are an old hand at genetic genealogy, this talk is for you! Understanding your DNA results, connecting with long lost cousins, and gaining insight into family history through DNA has become easier than ever. Is your family really Scottish and not Irish? Could your ancestors have been part of the migration of Palatine Germans to England in the early 1700s? DNA can help you find out!

And what if your DNA is different from the rest of the members of your family? Should you hide under the bed? Refuse all incoming phone calls? /No! / Come find out what a terrific opportunity you have to
discover interesting family history if your DNA /doesn/’t match anyone else’s.

In this talk, you will learn the basics of what DNA is, how you ‘do’ genetic genealogy, and what you can derive from your DNA results. Colleen takes a new look at old resources, explaining how DNA can be
combined with paper genealogy to provide a more powerful toolbox for solving genealogical mysteries. Colleen also gives success stories in tracing otherwise lost family history-unexpectedly connecting a group to
a geographical region and to historical events occurring there.

This talk on DNA is very different from others you might have heard. No matter what level of understanding you have about genetic genealogy, this talk is for you!

Topic #3 -'The Hand in the Snow and the Crash of Northwest Flight 4422'

As reported by MSNBC, CNN, and newspapers worldwide, including USA Today and the Washington Post:

On March 12, 1948, at 9:14 pm, Northwest Flight 4422 en route from Shanghai, China to La Guardia Field, New York, slammed into Mount Sanford, a 16,237-foot peak located in a remote area of Alaska, 200 miles northeast of Anchorage. The 30 merchant marines onboard, including six crewmen and twenty-four passengers, were killed instantly. Nothing was done to recover the wreck. Because of its remote location, the crash site was abandoned, the debris digested within a few days by the active glacier into which it fell. It would take 50 years, and the efforts of two commercial airline pilots to reach the scene of the accident. It would take another ten years and a team of world class forensic genealogists, DNA experts, and fingerprint experts to identify the frozen human forearm and hand that was found by the pilots, well-preserved by the glacier for half a century.

By September 2008, 28 of the 30 passengers had been eliminated by fingerprint matching, DNA analysis, or both. Only two more passengers remained on the list, the two most difficult to locate family members for who could serve as references for DNA analysis.

Our search for the family of Passenger #29, was featured on MSNBC and newspapers worldwide including USA Today and the Washington Post. Francis J. Van Zandt was born in 1911 in Vermont, the son of a father
from upstate New York and a mother wo was an obscure Irish immigrant named Margaret Conway. Come here how we did the impossible and traced the Conway family in Ireland back to 1800 and then forward again to the present. Come find out how we achieved the impossible and found a DNA match for the arm and hand in the snow, finally laying to rest the 30 passengers of Flight Northwest 4422.