Ethan Hatch

            My name is Ethan Hatch and I am a Slavic Language Research Consultant intern at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. I was born in California but have lived most of my life in Utah. From a young age I have been fascinated by genealogy and the history of Eastern Europe. These two interests grew together when I was called to serve as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Ukraine, where I spoke Russian. In January of 2022, after serving there for six months, I was evacuated due to the oncoming invasion. I was reassigned to serve in Croatia and Bosnia. There I learned Croatian and Serbian and even found out I have Croatian, Hungarian, Serbian, and Danube Swabian roots! My time as a missionary gave me a great desire to help others from central and eastern Europe understand and expand their family history. This carried over to my current studies at BYU, where I am in my junior year, double majoring in Family History: Genealogy and Russian. This summer I interned as an archivist at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, Poland. There I worked on a daily basis with Polish, Russian, and German records and helped compile a database of known Holocaust survivors. Eastern European family history means everything to me. Equal to my love of that part of the world is my love of serving and helping others trace their roots there.