| Dave Obee |
| Dave Obee is the president of the Federation of East European Family History Societies. He also runs Volhynia.com, a website dedicated to the past and future of the region in the northwest corner of Ukraine. Dave has been working on his own family history since 1978, and has travelled extensively to do his research. He has made nine trips to Europe in recent years, visiting 14 countries but putting special emphasis on Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Germany. Dave is an owner of Interlink Bookshop and Genealogical Services of Victoria, B.C. including as Genealogy Unlimited, which specializes in books and maps from Europe. He has compiled six books for Canadian genealogists, and has given more than 200 talks at seminars and society meetings since 1997. Dave has been a newspaper reporter or editor for several different newspapers in British Columbia and Alberta since 1972. He is currently editorial page editor of the Victoria Times Colonist. |
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| Presentations: |
| • | Adventures in Volhynia: Experience Western Ukraine Today |
| | A light-hearted look at the thrills of traveling to do research. It's worth it, just to trudge down the dusty streets where your ancestors once walked. A visit to your ancestral area can give you a better understanding of how your ancestors lived, and what your life would be like if they hadn't chosen to come to North America. Beyond that, there is a chance you'll make discoveries in archives that would be impossible without being there. |
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| • | Researching the German Colonies in Volhynia |
| | The past decade has seen tremendous growth in the number of sources available to people who are researching Volhynian ancestry. These sources include ones available on the Internet, through libraries and archives in North America, in Germany and in Ukraine. They include everything from land records to census returns to church registers -- and don't forget newspapers, too. |
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| • | EWZ: World War Two Immigration Records of Germans from East Europe |
| | Between 1939 and 1945 more than 2.1 million ethnic Germans who had been living in other countries applied to move to the Reich. They were processed by the Einwandererzentralstelle (EWZ, literally Immigration Center), a central German authority for the immigration and naturalization. The EWZ files are available on thousands of rolls of microfilms. |
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