My name is Matt Miller. I'm middle-aged Information Security Engineer that has always been interested in family history. I have a web page providing examples of recent phishing emails and discussing other aspects of email security. It can be found at https://www.freshphish.info.
I grew up in Columbus, Nebraska, spent some time in Rapid City, South Dakota, Gillette, Wyoming and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota before moving "back home" to Omaha, where I've lived since 1994.
I remember being interested in family history back when Roots came on television when I was about 10 years old. I finally got more interested and tried working on it back around 2003 when my mother gave me a family history book about the descendants of her grandfather and his brother but contained no information about their ancestors. I tried my hardest, using what little knowledge I had to do more research. In 2008, I was looking for the ancestors of my great-grandfather, Aloys/Alois/Aloysius Panther and his brother Ferdinand, in microfilms of church baptismal, marriage and death books in villages south of Baden-Baden, where they were said to have come from. I had actually found some Panther relations in Stadelhofen, Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany, but I didn't know they were related because I hadn't found Aloys' baptismal record there. Finally, in April of 2009, the daughter of my first cousin made a major breakthrough, finding Aloys and Ferdinand's baptismal records in Moesbach, Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany. My interest came back stronger than ever. Once you add in the power of the Internet along with my computer skills and new determination, I've been making huge progress in my research over the past 10+ years.
The people at the local family history center got to know me and respect my research abilities and asked me to give a presentation on German research at a monthly staff meeting in 2012. I also published a book about the genealogy of my great-grandfather Aloys Panther in Baden, Germany in 2011. In 2014, the local LDS church knew me from the family history center and asked me to put on a workshop for their members for several weeks in 2016. I published a book on the genealogy of my great-grandfather Charles Miller in 2017.
--Matt Miller
