Board of Directors

Owen M. McCafferty II

Co-Founder
Geschäftsführer & Chairman of the Board

owen@germansfromlithuania.org

Owen M. McCafferty (1991-) is an accomplished genealogist with expertise in the former German minority of southwest Lithuania known as the Deutsche aus Litauen. 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.

Alvin Hirsch

Treasurer & Secretary (Kassenführer & Schriftführer)

Alvin Hirsch, one of the founding members of IAGL, was born in Lithuania near the town of Kalvaria. All four of his grandparents lived near the town of Seirijai in southern Lithuania and he still has relatives in Lithuania today. Al is a retired international banker, financial executive, financial management consultant and finance professor. He has researched his ancestry quite extensively and successfully, and continues to be an active member of the. He maintains a website documenting his research and family history discoveries at www.Hirsch-Lithuania-Ancestry.com.

Cynthia Jacobson

Co-Founder

Vice President & Chief Editor (Chefredakteurin)

Cynthia Spurgat Jacobson, a founding member of IGAL, has always been intrigued by the surnames that end in -at. Her interest increased when her father showed her an internal passport, later dated to WWI, of his grandfather Johann Ferdinand Hutop with a photograph and the word “Wilkowiszki” stamped on it. Her search resulted in a 600 page fully cited book, The Three Spurgat Families from Wylkowiszki in 2010 and a 200 page Addendum in 2015. She is currently at work on a second addendum, mostly focused on family members who did not emigrate. She has maintained the blog, G-GLISP, German Lutherans in Suwalki Province since 2012. She is a retired teacher and part time ad hoc university instructor, and current educational consultant

Tobias Mayer

Vice President (Vizepräsident)

Tobias drew his first family tree of his mother's family when he was just a child. It was based on the original documents of his ancestors, which his grandfather had brought with him in 1944 when he fled with his entire family from Wischtiten (Vištytis) in Lithuania to Salzgitter in West Germany.

Tobias is an Islamic scholar and, after completing his studies, spent five years researching and publishing on Islamic numismatics. He then attended journalism school and worked for 15 years as a freelance editor for public radio in Germany, focusing on historical topics (the Islamic world, Africa, and Eastern Europe).

Since 2018, he has been working with genealogical and historical methods on all aspects of the history of the Evangelical Lutheran settlement in Lithuania from the 18th to the 20th century.

Randall Kulat

Legal Advisor (Rechtsberater)

Randy grew up in Western Springs, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), and graduated from the University of Illinois with high distinction in history and Phi Beta Kappa. He then graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law. He has been a lawyer in Chicago for over 40 years, practicing in the areas of public finance, tax incentives and real estate and asset-based lending. He met his wife Elizabeth while they both worked at The Daily Illini, the student newspaper in Champaign-Urbana. Randy and Beth have been married for 40 years and live in Oak Park, Illinois. They have two adult daughters who both live in Los Angeles and work in the film industry.

Both of Randy’s parents attended the same Lutheran church in Chicago where they were baptised, confirmed and married, and all of his grandparents came to Chicago in the early 1900s as immigrants from German-speaking regions in what are now Lithuania and Poland. His ancestral surnames include Kulat, Gerulat, and Neubacher and has ties in the areas of Wizajny (now in Poland), Vistytis, Marijampole, and Kybartiai.  

Past Board Members

Alan Schlosser - Vice President (2021-2025)

Volunteers