Titles of some of Lou’s books include: The second and third editions of The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy (co-edited with Sandra Luebking); They Became Americans; Chicago and Cook County Sources: A Genealogical and Historical Guide; Ellis Island: Tracing Your Family Through America’s Gateway, and with Sandra Luebking, she is the co-author of The Archives: A Guide to the National Archives Field Branches. With Matt Wright, she is co-author of Finding Answers in U.S. Census Records.

Lou has lectured at more than twenty national conferences and hundreds of workshops since 1980. Additionally, she has taught family history classes for local schools and for the National Archives-Great Lakes Region in Chicago. Television interviews include the PBS Ancestors series, ABC News, CNN News, and the ABC television show, The View.

Angela McComas has been working in the genealogy field about fifteen years, working on her own family lines and those of friends and clients. She works full-time at the Midwest Genealogy Center, where she coordinates classes and special programming. Angela teaches many classes at the Library and for societies, both local and national, and has been published in several venues.

Kathleen Brandt is the sole proprietor of a3Genealogy with more than 10 years' experience as a professional genealogist and is a licensed Private Investigator. She researches for NBC's Who Do You Think You Are? and PBS's Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates. She has extensive experience in international and nationwide documentation retrieval, free-colored research, military record retrievals, tracing slaves, as well as Irish, Swedish, and German records. As a freelance writer, her genealogy articles have been published in the Genealogy Archives online magazine, and on the a3genealogy.blogspot.com website. She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG).

Jolene Clark is a reference assistant at the Midwest Genealogy Center and enjoys helping others find their ancestors. She has a Bachelor’s in History from Brigham Young University and is currently working on her Master’s in Library Science at the University of Missouri. Jolene first became interested in genealogy about 24 years ago when she took a correspondence course in genealogy to earn credit for college. She began by researching her Australian family, finding some convict ancestors in her family tree. Now she manages to turn every family vacation into some type of genealogy trip and tries enlisting the help of her husband and four children.

Beth discovered her love of genealogy through her father, who built a 115-name family tree with every family member’s name he knew. This family treasure became the launching point for her research. While Beth continues to research her family, she shares her knowledge through lectures, articles, her blog (genealogydecoded.com), and one-on-one assistance. She particularly enjoys speaking at regional venues including the Missouri and Nebraska State Conferences. Her focus is early American genealogy.

Cynthia Shively

Cynthia Shively has worked at Midwest Genealogy Center since April 2012. In addition to her regular duties at MGC, submitting blogs and assisting with MGC’s Facebook page, Cynthia writes for her own personal blog called The Spoken Ellipsis – A Writer’s Layover. For Cynthia, social networking is the cornerstone to her research, writing, and art. Her primary social networking sites are Facebook, both personally and professionally, Pinterest, and her own blog.

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