Owen M. McCafferty II is an accomplished genealogist with expertise in the former German minority of southwest Lithuania known as the Deutsche aus Litauen in addition to research in Poland, particularly the Russian partition. His 20 years of experience in genealogical research was sparked by an interest in his maternal grandfather’s family history which grew into a life-long passion. His lectures on the Germans from Lithuania have been featured at the International German Genealogy Partnership, the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe, and the Foundation for Eastern European Family History Studies. In 2021, he contributed research for the BBC television programme Who Do You Think You Are? He is the founder and President of the not-for-profit International Association of Germans from Lithuania (IAGL) and has helped to translate tens of thousands of German, Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian records and documents for their online index. He holds a BA in English from Baldwin Wallace University where he minored in Entrepreneurship. Professionally, he is an experienced Product Manager, specializing in new product development and product innovation. In addition to genealogy, his other passion is analog film photography. He is a contributing podcast host for the Film Photography Project in Fair Lawn, New Jersey where he also volunteers his time and expertise to help preserve small format analog motion picture film shooting. In 2022, he published Vom Pongau Nach Cleveland: The Ancestors and Descendants of Heinrich Saleker & Emeilie Wiemert a 478-page family history on his maternal grandfather’s line. In 2023, he began writing his next book Across the Empires to Glen Lyon about his maternal grandmother’s Polish family who originated in the three different partitions of Poland and emigrated to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.