Speaker: Janeen Bjork

Janeen Bjork will share her search methodology via several case studies that illustrate how anyone can find and preserve family items from online newspapers. The presentation begins with a lesson on OCR (optical character recognition, the technology that allows newspapers to be searched online), and how to get around its significant failure rate. It continues with best practices for conducting research in about a dozen popular newspaper resources. There will be examples and a walk through the websites that you’ll want to explore. If you leave out online newspapers from your genealogy research toolbox, you are missing out on items that will link people, confirm or refute family tales, and give color to your data!

A TV researcher and genealogy teacher, Janeen has been obsessed with the information historical newspapers contain ever since she found a story about the 1894 murder of her great-great grandfather, William Strutz, in a Syracuse, NY, newspaper. Since then she has found over 130 accounts of the tragedy, in newspapers all over the country.

Janeen has been teaching Genealogy at Norwalk (CT) Community College and for CT Adult Ed. programs since 2015. She is a popular guest speaker who presented to Genealogy organizations in multiple cities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Florida in 2019. She was the editor and content manager for an heirloom quality book, The James Family of Ord, Nebraska, that combined hundreds of newspaper and magazine items about the client's family with material from private archives. Janeen is the webmaster and program booker for the Connecticut Ancestry Society. She serves as a delegate for CAS to the New England Regional Genealogy Consortium. She was both a speaker and a co-chair of the On-Site Evaluation Committee for the NERGC 2019 conference.