Western Michigan Genealogical Society

11/01/2025

Western Michigan Genealogical Society is raising funds for the Veterans Bounty Land Records Project. See this page on our website for more information and to make a donation to this important project.

WMGS is matching funds raised up to $2,250.

https://wmgs.org/veterans-bounty-land-records/

05/12/2025

Meeting Announcement: The DNA Interest Group (DIG) will be meeting this Thursday, May 15, at 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. This is our last meeting before our summer break (next meeting September 18). We meet in the Vander Veen room on the 4th floor of the Main Branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

For the first part of the meeting we will go over some opportunites for DNA self-study over the summer. Then one of our members is going to be presenting a DNA mystery to us. If you are brand new to DNA and have not come to a meeting before please consider joining us. We love to have new people at our meeting!

12/09/2024

From Linda Wells:

Monday, December 9th at 6:30PM, Linda Wells will be teaching a genealogy class at the downtown Grand Rapids Library. The class will be on the History floor, 4th floor, in the VanderVeen room.

We will be going over Researching Newspapers for genealogy results. The newspapers of a community chronicle the successes, failures, and everyday lives of the people who live there.

We will be going over:
• Obituaries and death listings
• Birth announcements and christenings
• Engagements, weddings & anniversary announcements
• Society news and local gossip
• Public announcements and advertisements
• Legal articles
• Church announcements
• Military news
• School news and activities
• Misc
We'll also go over a handful of great websites to use in your research.

12/06/2024

Please join us tomorrow, Saturday, December 7, 2024 for our monthly presentation at 1:30 p.m. at the Grand Rapids Public Library – Main Branch in the Ryerson Auditorium. Jim Jackson will be speaking about the War of 1812.

More specifically he will give an overview of the causes and significant events of this war, the only war partially fought on Michigan soil. Also, how to research military, bounty land and pension records online or at local, state or national archives.

10/16/2024

MEETING NOTICE: The DNA Interest Group (DIG) will be meeting this Thursday, October 17, at the Main Branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library in the Vander Veen room on the 4th floor. We have a meeting at 3:30 p.m. and one at 6:30 p.m. We are going to learn about ISOGG (International Society of Genetic Genealogy). This is a great organization with a lot of resources. Hope to see many of you at either meeting!

Need help with genetic genealogy? Established in 2005, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy is the first society founded to promote the use of DNA testing in genealogy.

08/01/2024

Meeting Update: The DNA Interest Group (DIG) is NOT meeting in August. Enjoy the rest of summer and keep working on your individual DNA projects! 🙂 Our next meetings will be on Thursday, September 19, at 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on the 4th floor of the Main Branch of GRPL in the Vander Veen room.

04/16/2024

MEETING REMINDER: The DNA Interest Group (DIG) will be meeting this Thursday, April 18, at the Main Branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library in the Vander Veen room on the 4th floor. We have a meeting at 3:30 p.m. and one at 6:30 p.m. We are going to learn about the "What are the Odds" tool. This tool uses calculations to determine probabilities of possible relationships with DNA questions. Hope to see many of you at one of the meetings!

Multiple Relationship Probability Tool for DNA

03/19/2024

Hello Everyone,

This is a reminder that we have our DNA Interest Group meeting this Thursday, March 21, in the Vander Veen room on the 4th floor of the Main Branch of GRPL.

As most of you know, we now have a day offering of the DIG meeting. We have our regular 6:30 p.m. DIG meeting and we have a 3:30 p.m. version of this meeting on the same day.

Each meeting will have the same content so feel free to attend either meeting.

This week we are going to talk about X-DNA again but with a little more depth. I have an interesting X-DNA chart that can be used to track your own X-DNA inheritance pattern.

I hope to see many of you this Thursday!

02/09/2024

MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT: Our next regularly scheduled DNA Interest Group meeting is going to be this Thursday, February 15 at 6:30 p.m. We meet in the Vander Veen room on the 4th floor of the Main Branch of GRPL.

And.....we are going to try our day meeting again. We will have our first day meeting of the DNA Interest Group on Thursday, February 15 at 3:30 p.m. in the same place as the evening meeting. This will be an organizational meeting to see how many people are interested and where these members are at with using DNA for genealogy.

I am looking forward to both meetings and can't wait to see everyone!