Meet three fabulous volunteers on the Icelandic Roots Genealogy Database team. We are working together to make this online resource better every day. These three are 'Western Icelanders.' We also have other volunteers in Iceland and in North America. However, these three sent their info and photos in right away.
David Jonasson, Colorado (Website, Software, and Coding Specialist)
Dave Jonasson started with genealogy soon after he retired in 2013. He was looking for a place to store his families’ historical information. Ancestry.com was the starting point, but he was soon introduced to Icelandic Roots by George Freeman who answered an Ancestry post.
After receiving a great deal of data gathering and interpretation assistance from Sunna and Doreen Kristjanson, he offered to help with the IR website. His Computer Science degree and 35 years working in IT management helped him learn the new technologies used by Icelandic Roots TNG software. He has made a number of changes to the site, including writing the timeline and famous ancestor reports, menu reorganization and rewriting the relationship calculator.
Dave and his wife Jean relocated from Winnipeg to Denver in 1981 – 98 years after his great-grandfather immigrated to North Dakota and 88 years after he relocated to Manitoba. They have two daughters, one in Denver and one in San Francisco.
Doreen Kristjanson Marston (Genealogy)
My name is Doreen Kristjanson Marston, daughter of Hannes G Kristjanson & Elizabeth I Bjornson who are children/ grandchildren of Pembina County, North Dakota Icelandic immigrants.
I took over my father's 25+ yrs of Icelandic genealogy research and put his published family trees on the computer while continuing to research my Icelandic ancestors the past 10 years.
The opportunity to visit Iceland, relatives, and walk in my ancestors footsteps was made possible with two trips to Iceland touring the family farms. With great respect and love of my Icelandic heritage, I am pleased to be part of the Icelandic Roots volunteer staff.
David Johnson (Genealogy)
By age ten, David was already intrigued and deep into exploring his own family roots. Most of his lines were already well-documented and pushed back many generations, but David poured through those records and pushed the boundaries, back then through microfilm research. While attending Brigham Young University in the early 1980s, he took genealogy classes that furthered his passion and interest in this field. These courses not only taught him new research tools and techniques, but they taught him the importance of organizing and indexing the massive amounts of data that surface so it is usable, accurate, and efficient to work with.
While his focus was mainly on his British roots, about five years ago he decided to dive into learning more about his Icelandic line. David is proud of being 1/8 Icelandic and is extremely immersed in the culture, language and genealogy resources of Iceland now. David is active in the Icelandic Club of Greater Seattle, a member of Icelandic Association of Utah, and has been to Iceland twice, once as part of the wonderful Snorri Program. He was co-chair of the 2013 Icelandic National League of North America convention held in Seattle.
David specializes in researching the 400 or so Icelanders who emigrated to or through Utah between 1855 and 1914, since that is where his own family story is found. But living in Seattle the past 20+ years, he's also becoming an expert in the early Icelandic families that settled in Seattle starting in the 1880s.
David's professional career is in the child support enforcement field, tracking down elusive parents and their assets to make sure they are financially taking care of their children as the courts have ordered them to do. These skills have really helped David find clues and solutions in elusive genealogy quests through various on-line resources, imaged documents, libraries and databases.
To see the homepage and view the menu items, statistics, and read more about the genealogy database, click this link: www.IcelandicRootsDatabase.com
A huge thanks to the volunteers - we are making a difference!