Content: In Part I of this recorded and guided tour of the Ancestry database, attendees will be walked through the layout of the Ancestry interface. This 45-minute meeting will introduce attendees to Ancestry’s navigation menu, drop-down menus, downloadable resources, and major features including the census, vital, military, and immigration records, and quick links. A brief period at the end of the session will be reserved for questions and will not be recorded. Note: The two following meetings in this series are 1-hour long each. If interested, attendees may want to collect some familial information like the name and birthdate of their oldest living relative before our series begins, to perform sample searches on their own time. 

Speaker: Jean Cooper is the Principal Cataloger in the Metadata and Discovery Services Unit of the University of Virginia Library. She has acted as the Genealogical Resources Specialist at UVA for the past 20 years. She is the author of several books on genealogy and Virginia history. Her most recent is Hidden Wills: An Index of Wills Found in Central Virginia Chancery Records Through 1870 (Shortwood Press, 2019) in which she indexes the wills that are included in the Chancery Records Index available at the Library of Virginia. 

Moderator: Katrina Spencer is the Librarian for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is learning the basics of initiating genealogical research alongside registrants for this series. Katrina will be jointly responsible for the pedagogical and technological design of this series.