Speaker Bio:

Crista has been a professional genealogist since 2002 and employed by Ancestry since 2004. Her involvement in family history, however, reaches all the way back to childhood when she was parked under a microfilm reader at the Family History Library in her baby carrier. Since then, she has spent thousands of hours discovering, documenting and telling family stories. As the Corporate Genealogist at Ancestry, she teaches at genealogy conferences and events around the world. She has produced and starred in more than 400 episodes of “The Barefoot Genealogist” since 2012. Past episodes of her show can be found on the Ancestry YouTube channel.

Outside of her responsibilities at Ancestry, Crista was a founding member and the first president of the Utah Valley Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists, a board member of the Utah Genealogical Association, and she currently serves as a director on the board of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Her research specialties are solving unknown parentage using AncestryDNA and Jewish Immigration to the United States. But, her biggest passion is educating beginners so they can make the same exciting discoveries in family history that she has.