Guest Speaker: Gail Chaid
Come learn how discovering letters from 100 years ago
lead to finding Gail Chaid’s family history!!
Gail Chaid inherited “the box’ from her mother’s closet. You know the one. The box no one wants to tackle. In it were letters from her grandparents from World War I. Gail’s grandparents wrote back and forth. Her grandmother was in Bulgaria and her grandfather was in the United States. The letters were written in Cyrillic.
Gail learned finding records in the U.S. is easy, but finding the details of her family story in another country a challenge. A country like Bulgaria, which was overrun for centuries by so many other factions, where boundaries kept changing, made the quest harder. Experts tried to help, but the more she looked, the more frequently Gail ran into brick walls. Her strategy had to change. Join Gail to hear how she changed her approach, and what she found.
Gail Chaid is a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with B.S. and Masters’ Degrees in Education. She taught for 38 years and ran the Independence High School Planetarium for 18 years. Gail published an article in Pastfinder in September 2014 about her experience in Bulgaria researching her family history, and has given genealogy talks to several Bay Area groups. Gail has lived in San Jose since 1970, raised three children and retired in 2008.
This presentation appeals to genealogists of all levels.