Katy Bodenhorn Genealogy Research

02/25/2026

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Link to sign up for the newsletter in the comments below. Visit my website and input your email address into the purplish banner that drops down from the top on the home page.

02/23/2026

Do I have Indiana-based followers? I'm thrilled to share I'll be doing an IN-PERSON full-day lecture series (including a co-presentation with James M. Beidler) on day 2 of the Indiana Genealogical Society's conference in April just southwest of Indianapolis!

As someone with recent Indiana heritage myself (hello Allen, Madison, and Blackford Counties!) I'm excited to be back.

Want to attend from afar? This is a HYBRID event and can be viewed from the comfort of your home on Zoom.

Topics we'll be covering include:

-Waves of German immigration
-Colonial-era newspapers
-Migration routes into the Midwest
-Using image-only and Full-Text searchable collections

Tickets are available for day 1, day 2, or the full conference here: https://indgensoc.org/event-details/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQJZA1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETJEcVdvdGZqWldNRlI0bERmc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsZVaHwbAGq1sWq630G02nDFiMRYeqxPzrRfevC9yHP3N6hu1ebvdbsL8BNm_aem__GwyHek9AmrzD40KSNm7zA

🌳 The Roots of a Nation Begin Here.

Registration is officially OPEN for the 2026 IGS Annual Conference!

April 17–18 | Plainfield, Indiana & Virtual
Early registration closes April 12.

Join us for two powerful days of:
✔ AI for Genealogists
✔ Indiana State Archives updates
✔ German immigration research
✔ Revolutionary-era newspapers
✔ Unlocking unindexed records
✔ Networking with fellow history lovers

Your family story deserves to be discovered.

🎟 Register now: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/3babyvf

02/17/2026

My genealogy research Valentine's sale continues through the end of the month! Buy 10 hours of my time, get an additional 4 hours free! Let me work to find your immigrant ancestor, break through your brick wall, or sort through all those same-named folks!

All clients receive a report, plus copies of records found, and a log of sources searched.

02/15/2026

Maybe a little bit of a spicy post, but...One of my personal goals as a professional genealogist is to help people get out of a strictly patriarchal mindset when it comes to family trees--to encourage curiosity in the whole family tree, not *just* the direct male surname line.

Maternal lines contribute an equal 50% to your family tree, but they're often ignored when people talk generally about their ancestors, and in my experience are less likely to be the subject of study when people hire a genealogist. It's been my observation that when a lot of folks say they want to learn "where they came from," they often just mean where their own last name came from. And that narrow focus leaves out a LOT of your heritage. How many interesting stories, ancestors, immigrant hometowns, and opportunities for connection are lost when we only care about one branch? (And from a research strategy standpoint, what clues are you missing out on when not researching whole family units?)

This Thread below is a good example I saw recently that made me shake my head a little. Seems pretty improbable that every branch of his family naturalized in 1917, but the language used betrays a narrow view of who counts as an ancestor.

02/09/2026

If you have British Isles or Irish ancestry, Findmypast is offering free access to their newspaper collections through February 16.

Celebrate the publication of Findmypast's 100 millionth newspaper page by exploring real stories from the decades the British public calls ‘the good old days.'

02/09/2026

There's always a genealogy connection. The Bad Bunny halftime show last night and its evocative sugar cane "fields" setting reminded me of research I did for a client years ago, tracing their ancestors from Hawaii back to Puerto Rico.

A *very* short bit of nutshell history: Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States in 1898. When the island was devastated by Hurricane San Ciriaco in 1899, thousands of farming families were displaced and unable to make a living. The American sugar corporations in the new Territory of Hawaii--also newly annexed by the U.S.--saw an opportunity and began recruiting Puerto Ricans to take the enormous journey by sea to Maui to labor on the sugar plantations (familiar work, since sugar was also a major crop in PR).

Between 1900 and 1901, over 5,000 Puerto Ricans (laborers and their families) made the arduous journey from one island to the other, via both ships and train. It was an exploitative and racially discriminatory situation for the new arrivals, in part because Puerto Ricans--though a U.S. territory--were not granted even a limited version of citizenship until 1917, and because the American sugar bosses paid wages according to race.

Today, descendants of those initial immigrants contribute a small but impactful cultural influence to Hawaii's already diverse population, particularly on the Big Island and on O'ahu.

Genealogists can find Hawaiian-Puerto Ricans in World War I draft cards, and censuses from 1910 onward. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be surviving passenger lists for the critical California to Hawaii leg of the journey.

Photo credits: ABC News and the Images of Old Hawaii site.

02/07/2026

Genealogy lovers, it's sweet deal time. Now through the end of February, get 14 hours of custom professional genealogy research for the price of 10 hours! That's a savings of over $300!

Visit my website linked in the comments and submit a query.

02/05/2026

Anyone else have a pet who is a genealogical obstructionist? Pro-tip that dachshunds will try to stand on your laptop when they feel you have paid too much attention to the records of dead folks on your screen and not enough to them.

At least he's not interested in my coffee!

02/01/2026

Anybody else ever go to Cracker Barrel and wonder where they got the old photos on the walls? I saw one recently that looked very familiar.

On the left is the Cracker Barrel photo of an unknown young lady. On the right is my grandmother as a little girl, circa 1914. Same lightweight white dress with mid-length sleeves, big white bow, necklace, button-up white boots. (I cropped the photo, but my grandma's two sisters were also pictured, dressed identically.)

Fashion! And one of my favorite eras to research. I am always greedy for photos like this, from this period.

02/01/2026

We all love finding an ancestor's will. Especially pre-1850, there are so few records that name all of an ancestor's children in one spot. But wills aren't the only records that can do that. Look to the county deed book as well. Here's an example:

Joseph Zumbro died in 1783. His will was disappointingly short and though it mentioned children, it didn't actually name any of them. Boo hiss.

Anyway, it turned out all was not lost.

A whopping forty-five years later, all of his adult kids (and the women's husbands) were named in a deed, jointly selling a piece of property from their long-deceased father's estate. Those names weren't in the will. And so far, this is the only *direct evidence* I found in my research that one of the daughters was, in fact, Joseph's child. Ka-ching.

I'll be giving a whole lecture in early May at the Ohio Genealogical Society Conference on how deeds can help you reconstruct families. Come to Sharonville and say hello.

Image source: Joseph Zumbroh heirs to Jacob Loos, 28 September 1828, Berks County, Pennsylvania, vol. 37, p. 367; Berks County Recorder of Deeds.

01/18/2026

Join us in June in Lancaster!

This will be an awesome event!

01/10/2026

For my Ohio, western PA, and Midwest people: the annual OGS conference is a great one and I'll be speaking there in person on the topics below. April 29-May 2 in Sharonville, outside Cincinnati. Hope to see you there!

We welcome Katy Bodenhorn as a returning presenter. Her talks on record sets, where to find and how to access them will help steer your research in the right direction. Early registration is underway...don't delay!