Kahlile Mehr from Family History Library to Speak in Rapid City

You may not know his name, but you’ve probably benefited from his work. Kahlile Mehr is the Manager of the Slavic Collection Management & Cataloging for the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and was instrumental in acquiring the St. Petersburg Lutheran records.

Kahlile has been involved in East European genealogy since 1992 when he first visited archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Minsk – and has made multiple visits to these archives as well as to Saratov, Odessa, Kherson, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kishinev.

On his first visit to the St. Petersburg archives, he discovered the St. Petersburg Lutheran Consistory and requested it be filmed. Those records have long been a critical source of information for Lutheran German-Russian researchers! The images are now online at the FHL website, and Kahlile has been instrumental in getting GRHS permission to post our indexes for these records online. (See St Pete indexes on Clearing House page, Bessarabia St. Pete index on Odessa)

Kahlile has long worked with German-Russian researchers (such as Gwen Pritzkau) and has been a wonderful support to GRHS in learning more about the records being made available and making our GRHS rack cards available to researchers at the main FHL.

The depth of his knowledge is hard to beat – he’s written 2 books and 41 articles on topics related to genealogy. His B.A. was in Russian; he has an M.L.S. in Library Science and an M.A. in Family and Local History. Kahlile has worked at the Family History Library since 1980 and has presented papers and been a speaker at numerous genealogy conferences.

We are truly fortunate to have him speak at the GRHS convention in Rapid City! Look for his workshops on Saturday, September 12 at 8:30 and 2:30.