Jane Neff Rollins
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Thursday, March 18, 2021 6:30 pm EDT
Online Event
Does the thought of getting COVID scare you? Maybe not – but it should. Yes, today we have vaccines (sort of), antiviral medications, and chicken soup. But imagine what it was like in 1918, when the “Spanish” influenza exploded into a worldwide outbreak (pandemic) that may have killed as many as 100 million people. In Philadelphia, one of the early hotspots, you couldn’t get a doctor to make a house call because the dial telephone didn’t exist yet, and all calls had to be connected by an operator—so many of whom were sick from the flu that telephone exchanges were closed. There weren’t enough coffins or gravediggers, and corpses piled up in the streets in Philadelphia and other cities until mass graves could be dug with bulldozers. This talk will:
· recap how this novel type of flu spread worldwide
· cover how to research what happened to your family during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic
· discuss what lessons from that pandemic can be applied today as we deal with coronavirus-19
Speaker's Bio: Jane Neff Rollins is a professional genealogist at Sherlock Combs Genealogy®. In addition to having 25+ years of personal research experience, Jane has conducted genealogical research at repositories in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Washington DC, and Jerusalem, Israel. She is an alumna of ProGen Study Group 29 and a multi-year attendee of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy and SLIG Academy, the Forensic Genealogy Institute, and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Society conferences.
Jane has lectured at the annual conferences of Federation of Genealogical Societies (2019), the National Genealogical Society (2018), the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Society’s (2012, Paris, France; 2013, Boston; 2014, Salt Lake City; 2015, Jerusalem, Israel; 2016, Seattle; 2019, Cleveland; 2021, Philadelphia), the Genealogy Jamboree (2016-21), the Northwest Genealogy Conference (2016), and at local genealogy societies throughout Southern California.
Her articles have appeared in Avotaynu: The Journal of Jewish Genealogy, NGS Magazine, FGS Forum, Crossroads and other outlets. She received the FGS Forum Writer’s Award in 2020, for her article about using labor union documents for genealogical research.
Jane is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the Genealogical Speakers Guild, the National Genealogical Society, and several state and local genealogy societies.