As descendants of immigrant ancestors, it is simply a matter of time before our U.S. research ends and we must continue our quest in our ancestral homeland. For people of Greek descent, it is impossible to research successfully in “the old country” if you do not know your original ancestral surname and village of origin. This information is absolutely necessary as records are kept by locality and of course, names are written with the original Greek spelling. There are a plethora of U.S. documents which will give the researcher this information.

Of my most frequently requested lectures is How to Use U.S. Records to Find Your Immigrant Ancestor’s Original Surname and Village of Origin.  This lecture is a general overview of many record collections, and there are several additional lectures which discuss specific record groups.  At the request of my colleague, Gregory Kontos, I am dividing this topic into three “mini-segments” which I will share in this post, and on YouTube at GreekAncestry  and Spartan Roots.

This first presentation will explore using Immigration, Naturalization, and Alien Registration files. Please note that each of these topics is a one-hour lecture, but I have condensed these into a 24-minute overview in the following video. Additional videos will be added soon and will also appear in this post below this one.