Trish Hackett Nicola became CG® no. 799 on 1 May 2000. She served as trustee of the BCG Education fund in from 2015–2018. She was a director of the Association of Professional Genealogists from 2005–2010, and a founding member, program co-chair, chapter representative, and president of the Puget Sound Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Trish was program chair of “Meet Me at the Fair: Exploring the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition,” Pacific Northwest Historian’s Guild 2009 Conference in Seattle. She was also a trustee of the organization from 2020 to 2024.
Trish’s greatest skills have displayed in her work with the Chinese Exclusion Act (CEA) case files at the National Archives in Seattle where she has been indexing data from the files since 2001. She received the Archivist Award for Outstanding Achievement from the National Archives in 2016. Since 2015 she has blogged nearly monthly about this work, showcasing information found in the CEA files, along with guidance on how to location information in them. The blog can be found at https://chineseexclusionfiles.com.
Ms. Nicola presented at the National Genealogical Society conference in Sacramento in 2022 on using the CEA files. She has presented extensively along the west coast on using these files and on other topics.
In addition to the blog, Trish has been published in the Oregon Historical Society Quarterly, The California Nugget, Irish Lives Remembered, Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly, and elsewhere.
In retirement, Trish intends to continue her research and blog about the CEA case files. She’ll also work on writing and publishing about her research on her own family, and dig into learning more about using DNA in genealogy.
On behalf of BCG and the entire genealogical community, thank you, Trish!The words Certified Genealogist and its acronym, CG, are a registered certification mark, and the designations Certified Genealogical Lecturer and its acronym, CGL, are service marks of the Board for Certification of Genealogists®, used under license by board certificants after periodic evaluation.