Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/09/2027
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Erie 1 BOCES
Categories
Summary: Polish-language newspapers can reveal details about our ancestors that may never have appeared in the mainstream English-language press—from birth, marriage, and death announcements to photographs, community news, and stories of everyday life. This presentation explores major online sources for Polish newspapers published in the United States and Poland, along with strategies for finding relevant titles and overcoming the challenges of imperfect OCR. Attendees will also learn how Polish grammar and changing surname forms affect keyword searches, and how AI and other translation tools can help make Polish-language articles accessible to researchers who don’t speak Polish.
About our speaker: Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz is a genealogist, writer, and speaker with more than 30 years of experience researching her family’s roots in Poland, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Her passion for genealogy began when she received a copy of her great-grandparents’ marriage record as a gift. Seeing the names of a previously unknown generation of ancestors sparked a lifelong fascination with uncovering family stories.
Julie currently serves as President of the Polish Genealogical Society of New York State (PGSNYS) and has previously served as Vice President of the New England Regional Genealogical Consortium, Inc., and Secretary of the Polish Genealogical Society of Massachusetts (PGSMA). She also administers several genealogy-focused Facebook groups.
Her articles have appeared in the newsletters of the PGSNYS, PGSMA, the Polish Genealogical Society of America, the Western New York Genealogical Society, and the Irish Genealogical Society International. She is the author of the genealogy blog From Shepherds and Shoemakers, and has presented on Polish genealogical research at local, regional, and national conferences—including RootsTech 2025 in Salt Lake City.
Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz