Kathy Thorbjarnarson

Kathy grew up in the New York City region with an Icelandic father and Canadian mother. She has attended university in upstate New York (BS Biology-Geology), North Carolina (MS Marine Science) and California (PhD Environmental Engineering). She retired after 30 years of teaching hydrogeology at San Diego State University. Her genealogical investigations led her to discover the Icelandic Roots database.

Kathy's father was the only member of his family to immigrate to another country. He was a well-known surgeon in New York City. Kathy has twin half-sisters and many cousins in Iceland. She started her genealogy research with a list of ancestors tracing back to Egil Skallagrimson from her dad. She pestered her Icelandic relatives for information from their Íslandingabók app for further genealogy work. Discovering the ability to access the database has been wonderful for tracing back and confirming her dad’s original list! And a lot more relatives to be discovered as well.

Her mother’s grandparents immigrated from Scotland to Ontario, Canada around the same time as the Icelandic immigration to Canada. The stories of farming in the prairies of Canada under extreme conditions seem to be very similar. Unfortunately, tracing back family into Scotland is much more challenging.

Besides genealogy, Kathy enjoys reading the Icelandic sagas and researching the saga of people and places. In the past, travelling through Iceland with her father and other relatives always entailed saga place discussions. Being able to travel herself with saga information as well as the knowledge of the geology is something she appreciates (although her kids don’t). She will be working on enhancing the database to identify people who are mentioned in the sagas.