Call To Meeting

Call to Virtual Meeting – April 20

That’s right friends, UJGS is having a virtual meeting.

We hope everyone who can has been staying home, maybe getting some genealogy research done. One day, things will get back to more normal, and when that happens, we’ll all be wanting more records from the archives in Eastern Europe.

Join us on Monday, April 20, at 6:30pm for Janette Silverman of Ancestry ProGenealogists as she tells us about Researching in Eastern European Archives.

For this meeting, we will be using GoToWebinar. If you are not familiar with the program, we will be online at 6pm for you to log in and test it out before the meeting begins. You will need an Internet connection and a speaker or headphones, or you can call in with your phone for audio. Some instructions can be found here.

You must register online to attend. You will receive an email confirmation with instructions and a link to use to join the meeting, including a reminder email 1 hour before the presentation.

We hope you’ll join us.

Press Release

Free Genealogy Webinars Daily

We hope our members are doing well, staying home, and staying healthy. During this difficult time, a plethora of information and entertainment is being offered online for free and we’d like to tell you about one.

Legacy Family Tree Webinars is releasing for free one webinar from their collection every day of April. Each day of the week has a different theme and there are quite a variety of topics.

Sundays are for methodology, Mondays are DNA topics, Tuesdays are ethnic genealogy, etc.

And we’re just in time to catch tomorrow’s (April 7) webinar on Sephardic Research.

You can view he entire schedule for the rest of month on the Legacy Family Tree web site.

What else have you been doing for the past month? Have you caught any operas at The Met? Seen any musicals or plays? Researched something on JSTOR? Virtually visited a museum? If you’re not using social media, you may be missing out on all the wonderful things now being shared for free online. You can also search on Google for “free things to do online”.

Press Release

24 Hours of Genealogy Webinars

MyHeritage is hosting a 24 hour marathon of webinars at Legacy Family Tree Webinars, on March 12th and 13th.

The webinars begin at 3pm today, March 12, and conclude the tomorrow.

You can see the list of webinars, the times, and register on their web site. Registration is for the full day, but you can log in for only the webinars you want to see. Additionally, the webinars will be available for free for a week, so if you miss the one at 2am, or even at 2pm, you have a week to catch it before you’ll have to pay to see it.

There are webinars on Swedish, Dutch, Belgian, Australian and New Zealand records, as well as evidence and proof, name-changing ancestors, several on DNA, US census, and more.

Be sure to check out the list to see which ones apply to your own research and don’t miss your chance for more genealogy education.

We meant to send this message out earlier, but even if you don’t make it to the live version, you still have a week to watch.

Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting – March 16

Our next meeting will take place on Monday, 16 March, at 6:30pm in the main floor classroom of the Family History Library.

Daniel R. Jones, the Manager of The Slavic Research Specialist Team at FamilySearch will talk about some of the things that FamilySearch has that could help people researching in the area. Bring any additional questions for Daniel to answer to help with your research.

We’ll see you there.

Miscellaneous

RootsTech Live Streaming – Free

You probably already know that RootsTech is this week. Some of our members may be attending. Some are working in the Expo Hall.

But if you haven’t bought a ticket to the conference, you can still enjoy some of the sessions. RootsTech is live streaming, as in previous years, and you can watch from home.

The schedule is on their web site: RootsTech Live Streaming.

The live stream will probably be right on that page, or they’ll provide a link from that page. They will stream all of the keynotes, this year called “general sessions”, along with many other presentations

Be sure to check the schedule so you don’t miss something you might want to see. Also, RootsTech usually shares those videos after the conference, so you’ll have another chance to watch them for free later. (Some keynotes in previous years were not shared later, so try to catch them live if you can.)


Call To Meeting

Call To Meeting Reminder – February 24

Our first meeting for 2020 is coming up on Monday, February 24th at 6:30pm in the main floor classrooms of the Family History Library.

Daniel Horowitz will present Israeli and European Records Available on MyHeritage.

Don’t forget that dues is due, $10 per person or $15 per couple. We can take credit cards in person as well as cash or check, or pay in advance online by credit card at Square.

See you next week.



Call To Meeting

Call To Meeting – February 24

Daniel Horowitz
Daniel Horowitz

It’s almost time for Utah JGS’s first meeting of the year. We will be meeting on Monday, February 24th at 6:30 pm in the main floor classrooms at the Family History Library.

Our speaker is Daniel Horowitz, the genealogy expert at MyHeritage, and he’ll be telling us about Israeli and European Records Available on MyHeritage.

This meeting takes place the same week as RootsTech. Whether you are planning to attend or not, in past years, the Expo Hall has been free to visit, and probably will be again. You can meet with the vendors and learn about the products and technologies they offer to assist with your genealogy research. We recommend a visit one day.

And because this is our first meeting of the year, it’s time to pay your dues: $10 per person or $15 per couple. You can pay in person (cash, check, or credit card) or by credit card online at Square.

See you there!

Press Release

USCIS Fee Hike

If you have a certain number of genea-friends on social media, you may have already seen this, but we want to inform you about something that is currently going on in the genealogy world.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, formerly the INS) has proposed an outrageous fee increase, raising the fees for a $65 search and the follow-up $65 record retrieval to $240 and $385 — a 492% increase.

What files does the USCIS have?

  • Naturalization Certificate Files (C-Files), September 27, 1906 to March 31, 1956
  • Alien Registration Forms (Form AR-2), August 1940 to March 1944
  • Visa Files, July 1, 1924 to March 31, 1944
  • Registry Files, March 1929 to March 31, 1944
  • A-Files, April 1, 1944 to May 1, 1951

These are records that cannot be found anywhere else. NARA should have already received some of these files, which would make them easier for genealogists to access, but they have not been passed along as they should have been. And no genealogy organization has access to them or even to the indexes.

The USCIS has provided an opportunity for us to comment on the proposed rule that dramatically impacts the USCIS Genealogy Records Program.

You can read more about the rule proposal at https://www.recordsnotrevenue.com/ as well as see samples of some documents you may get from USCIS.

We encourage all of our members and friends to then follow through and comment on how you feel about this fee increase at https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=USCIS-2019-0010-0001. They have already received over 11,000 comments and you can leave a comment until the end of December.

Call To Meeting

Call to Meeting Update – November 18

This is your reminder message of our upcoming UJGS meeting, November 18th, 6:30pm at the FHL in our usual room.

This is our election meeting and a good time to either volunteer yourself for a position or volunteer your ideas for what you want our society to do in the future.

And we have a speaker scheduled. (The previous message said we didn’t.) Lindsay Levine will be speaking about research in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

See you there.