Finding Your Roots: Back to Basics
Fall 2025 Series - Virtual Workshop
About the Workshop Series
Maryland Public Television and the Maryland Genealogical Society invite you to a beginner-to-intermediate genealogy workshop series this Fall. Finding Your Roots: Back to Basics consists of four (4) two-hour sessions that are designed to help you strengthen your research skills.
If you're beginning your family history journey or looking to boost your research skills, this workshop will equip you with the essential tools and techniques. We'll cover the basics of getting started, including the record types to begin with. We'll also walk you through using two major online sites to find those records and explore additional websites and repositories to help you continue building your tree. Along the way, we'll discuss how to track your research, avoid common pitfalls, and make confident conclusions based on solid evidence.
Each session features a combination of lecture, small and large group discussion, question and answer time, and a homework assignment relating to your family search. Handouts are provided for each session. The sessions will be recorded and registrants will have unlimited access to those recordings.
Your family does not need Maryland ties to benefit from this course; however, the instructor(s) will use some Maryland examples.
Those who attend will receive a one-year MPT Passport membership or membership extension, and a one-year membership to the Maryland Genealogical Society (MGS) -- not applicable to current MGS members.
Questions? Email [email protected]
In order to do efficient and effective research on our ancestors, we must work backward in time, proving links from each generation to the generation before it. We’ll look at how to gather information and organize it so we can create reliable links from our ancestors to their parents, and we’ll practice creating an ancestor profile.
While there are many kinds of records that are useful for building our family trees, vital records—birth, marriage, and death—and censuses are the building blocks of family history research. Learn how to find and understand these records and how to use them to determine additional research steps in other useful records.
Ancestry and FamilySearch are the most popular research sites for family historians, but putting ancestors’ names into search boxes only gets us so far. Learn how to be a power user of these sites to uncover additional records for our ancestors that don’t come up in a general search.
Many more useful resources exist for researching our ancestors besides Ancestry and FamilySearch. We’ll explore a variety of websites and record repositories that will open up new avenues of research to help us find and tell our family stories.
All workshop lectures are recorded. Registered attendees will have unlimited access to watch each recorded session.
The MPT Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit 501(c)(3). Your contribution supports MPT's service to children, education and the region. Thank you for your additional support.
