Nancy Collier Holden
Co-Founder
- Nancy has researched her own family lines back to eleventh-century rabbinic scholars on one side and records from the 1700s on the other.
- Her investigations have taken her into archives in Grodno, Lithuania, Latvia, and Odessa, and required her to learn Hebrew, Rashi script, Polish, and Cyrillic along the way.
- She has served as President of the Jewish Genealogical Societies of both Los Angeles and Orange County
- Editor of the genealogical journals Roots-Key and Shorashim, she was named IAJGS Volunteer of the Year in 2023.
- As Education Director of JewishGen for the past decade, she has designed and taught an array of skills-based courses for hundreds of genealogical researchers.
- A particular specialty is mentoring individual clients, helping them break through brick walls as they research their family histories.
- She brings that archival wizardry and creative problem-solving to client casework, particularly in Belarus, Ukraine, and the former Pale of Settlement.
Todd Holden, Ph.D.
Co-Founder
- Todd holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Social Science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and a B.A. in Social Ecology from UC Irvine.
- He holds genealogical certification from Boston University and the ProGen Study Group.
- A former tenured professor, he is trained in research design, data collection, evidence analysis, mentoring, and writing for publication — skills he now applies to client-centered genealogical projects.
- Among his numerous publications include academic textbooks, journal articles, a regular column on Japanese popular culture, a travelblog, literary nonfiction, philosophical detection, and science fiction.
- He currently teaches courses at JewishGen — in particular, writing-for-genealogists and advanced AI in genealogical investigation.
- At HoldenWorks he has conducted investigations in the United States, Galicia, Poland, the Soviet Union (now Belarus and Russia), and Bessarabia (now Romania and Ukraine).