About Us

This website is a collaborative effort between two Turks, Toni Turk and Nancy Turk.  We found each other through the internet (have not yet discovered our genealogical tie!) and after a few e-mails decided to publish this website.  This website www.turkgenealogy.com was officially registered as a domain name on 3/9/2001.

About Dr. Toni Richard Turk
The main content contributor to this site is Dr. Toni Richard Turk.  Toni is an accredited genealogist who has adopted the Turk surname and shares all of his information with the world through this website.  Toni has done genealogy actively since 1963 but does not do it professionally.  He is a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies.  All of the root information on this site - the history, the surname variations and the Turk database are the product of years of hard work by Toni. At the time of initial launch of this site in April 2001, Toni's database held over 10,100 Turks.  Toni and his wife have traveled the world.  Toni has done a lot of research on site in Europe and has traveled extensively in Russia and speaks Russian.  He retired to Blanding Utah USA, where he is the Director of Federal Programs for the San Juan School District.   Toni's email is trturk@earthlink.net More information about Toni, his family and his research is available at his web site: http://www.the-turkfamily-of-blandingutah.com/

Dr. Toni Richard Turk speaks about himself: 
"I am currently an Emeritus Accredited Genealogist, having first been
accredited with the Genealogical Society of Utah (now the Family History
Library) in Southern  (US) States Research in 1970. My active research
began in 1963. I was also the first Slavic Area Research Specialist for the
referenced GS. In that capacity I negotiated with the Chief Archivists of
the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia onsite in their respective
nations for the microfilming of church records. More recently I researched
San Juan County's Centennial Legacy Project - "Rooted in San Juan," which
is a genealogical study of every burial of record in San Juan County, Utah.
This 729 page study was published by the County in 1995. I am the Mayor of
Blanding, Utah. The current year (2005) is Blanding's Centennial. I had the
immediate oversight of a project to research and publish the family
histories of the families of our community. The result was a 3 volume 2,000
page record which was published in July 2005.

I have been a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies since 1999. To date I
have hand extracted over 55,878 individual records and merged them into an
integrated database that now well exceeds that for separate
individuals. These individuals are linked to the extent possible. The Guild
integrated database effort is aligned with a TURK Y-DNA Surname Project. So
far we have identified seven distinct haplogroups within our Y-DNA Project.
The alignment of the Y-DNA effort with the genealogical record has resulted
in overcoming the inevitable "brickwalls" for a number of our researchers.
It has also helped clarify numerous distinct origins of the surname. We
have identified 472 variant surname spellings that are of interest to us.
Our Y-DNA public site is: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/turk%2Dguild/"

The Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS) has appointed Toni to be Regional Representative for the Central US, which includes most of the Rocky Mountain States and goes as far east as Iowa and Louisiana and south to Texas.

About Nancy Turk
The website manager for the TURK Guild effort is Nancy Turk of the Chicago
area. Nancy Turk is the web enabler who has taken Toni's information and designed and published the site.  She got hooked on genealogy when researching her husband's Turk family in Virgil, Illinois USA. She has tracked eight generations of the Turcq family back to Braquis France. Nancy is currently writing the Turk Family Chronicles. She has coordinated with Toni to make his many years of research a shared reality on the web.

Nancy heads Communications for a Fortune 50 company in the Chicago suburbs. Part of her job includes oversight of the company's award winning intranet. Here is a photo of Nancy accepting the Bronze Anvil award for her work on the #1 Corporate Intranet.

Nancy works on public relations and communications for the Turk project. The Turk project has been reported in the daily "Sabah" newspaper in Istanbul, Turkey, the "Turk of America" magazine in the United States, and has been the subject of a radio program.  Our website is located at www.turkgenealogy.com. Our online database is maintained at http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=turk-guild. The online integrated database contains all source references and is updated
the first of every month.

We are proud to welcome you (and over 24,000 other researchers!) to our site.  
We are always looking for new material to share with our Turk Family of Researchers.  Please feel welcome to submit anything of Turk interest or to send us an email directly.  Explore to your hearts content!

Toni Turk trturk@earthlink.net  and Nancy Turk nturk@searshc.com