Sharon Sergeant (1947 - ) is a forensic genealogist who specialises in researching and tracing international fraud cases, property settlements, and provenance of artifact collections. Her expertise involves biographical research for historians, publishers, authors, and journalists. She attended Northeastern University and received a bachelor's degree from Boston University. She lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Sergeant is noted for exposing two high profile literary frauds in 2008, Misha Defonseca and Herman Rosenblat,[1] and for expanding the discipline and application of forensic genealogy.
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Sergeant is Director of Programs for the Massachusetts Genealogical Council, and adjunct professor at Boston University, lecturing on problem-solving techniques and technology. She is a forensic genealogist at IdentiFinders and owner of AncestralManor.com, and a systems engineering consultant at General Voice and Epodworks. Sergeant has worked in the fields of provenance, transportation systems, historical migration patterns, and artificial intelligence applications.
Sergeant and Colleen Fitzpatrick led the team that exposed as a hoax Misha Defonseca's bestselling book Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (Surviving with Wolves).[2] She also worked with the team that exposed Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence as a fraudulent account of his time as a concentration camp survivor.[1]
Sergeant's earlier career in artificial intelligence, internet technology and military security has been applied to forensic genealogy. She first complemented the work of forensic genealogist and physicist Colleen Fitzpatrick in the "Sheboygan Dead Horse Photo Mystery" in December 2006 by adding geographic map time lines to Fitzpatrick's photo analysis.[3]
"Stagecoach Maine" is the historic story of the 1848 Lewis Downing Concord No. V stagecoach as an emblem for the ties between the American East Colonial roots and the expansion into the American West. Sergeant collected material and consulted with other experts to augment documentation and analysis, concentrating on the 1840s through the 1880s.
Colleen Fitzpatrick and Sergeant exposed as a fraud Misha Defonseca, the Belgian-born author of the international best-seller Living with Wolves. This led to legal efforts to overturn a $33M judgment Defonseca had won against a U.S. publisher for breach of contract.
In the Defonseca case, Sergeant added both photo and financial timeline analysis to the data mining to determine where to focus the research. This case also involved building an international team able to deliver information on complex hoaxes to the press.
Journalist Blake Eskin, author of a book about the Binjamin Wilkomirski fraud,[4] stated in regards to the application of technology: "Most Defonseca doubters had focused on passages that were logically or historically implausible, but Sergeant assumed the story was false and instead scoured the various versions of the text for clues to the author's real identity. The American edition mentions the name Monique De Wael; the UK edition includes a date of birth — May 12, 1937 — and the fact that Defonseca's father worked at the town hall. Sergeant plugged these data points into genealogical databases and found researchers in Belgium to help look for information."[5]
When Eskin did a follow up article for Boston Magazine, where the discussion of the Defonseca financial fraud required extensive documentation and rigorous fact checking, Eskin recognized the value of the emerging discipline. "Genealogy has an image as a fuzzy pursuit for hobbyists who poke around dusty church basements and hunch over microfilm machines in search of their seventh cousin three times removed. But Sergeant approaches the discipline with as much rigor as she did her earlier work ... "[6]
With Colleen Fitzpatrick, Sergeant played a role in exposing as a fraud Herman Rosenblat's account of the way he survived a Holocaust concentration camp. Rosenblat's story related how he survived work camps in Poland and Germany because of a little girl who threw him apples and bread over the fence every day for seven months in 1942. He claimed that he was unexpectedly reunited with this same girl, Roma Rogers (originally Radzicki), on a blind date in New York in the 1950s, and married her shortly thereafter. Rosenblat promoted the story in the media for at least a decade, including appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in a planned but never-published autobiography and full length feature motion picture.
Initially, Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, had begun a general discussion of the improbability of the "Apple over the Fence" story on her personal blog in December 2007.[2]
In November, Sergeant was recruited by several Jewish agencies to investigate the Rosenblat case as a result of the Defonseca exposure. Sergeant first consulted with Holocaust survivors then combined forces with Fitzpatrick to assemble records for the Rosenblat family from the US back through England, Israel, Poland and Germany.
Fitzpatrick and Sergeant discovered apparent discrepancies in the story, and worked with Kenneth Waltzer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Michigan State University to prove the story was a fraud. They showed that while Radzicki was supposedly supplying the food that kept Rosenblat alive, she was hiding under false papers in Allach, Germany, about 200 miles away.
By November 12, Sergeant reported on Lipstadt's blog that the team had determined that Rosenblat's Holocaust story timeline of events was not accurate. Defenders conjectured that that was simply mis-remembering, but Sergeant pointed out that the Rosenblats had also mis-remembered their actual wedding date. The key to the hoax exposure was finding out where Roma Rosenblat and her family were during the Holocaust.
Sergeant and Fitzpatrick used dozens of documents, including transport lists of prisoners sent to the camps; historical records from the United States, Israel and Poland; maps of the camp drawn by former prisoners and survivors; and survivor testimonies. The team was able to verify that Rosenblat and his three brothers had been at Buchenwald and its subcamp. But one of the most crucial parts of the story lay in Roma Rosenblat's location - Roma's family had been in hiding more than 200 miles away, near Breslau, Germany.