Carmen J. Finley, Ph.D., CG, is a retired research psychologist. Her interest in genealogy began in 1979 and she started publishing articles in 1988, her first being in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Since then she has published additional articles in the NGS Quarterly as well as in The Virginia Genealogist, the American Genealogist, Tennessee Ancestors and The Genealogist. She is the author of "The Finleys of Early Sonoma County, California," published by Heritage Books, Inc., Bowie, Maryland, in 1997.
She has been chairman of the NGS Family History Contest since 1990, for which she received the NGS Distinguished Service Award in 1996. She is especially interested in methodology as it applies to the study of family history. In 1998 she and the Sonoma State University library jointly received the GENTECH Applied Technology award for outstanding contributions to technological and genealogical quality, based on the development of this database. GENTECH is a non-profit, all-volunteer corporation, which facilitates communication among persons interested in genealogy and technology. GENTECH sponsors national conferences, programs with other societies, and publishes white papers based on analyses of problems of common interest to genealogists and technologists.
Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and Teachers College, Columbia University, she spent thirty-five years as a research psychologist specializing in measurement and evaluation in education prior to her retirement in 1983. She worked for the Sonoma County Office of the Superintendent of Schools as Director of Research and Data Processing, the National Assessment of Educational Progress as Associate Director, and the American Institutes for Research as a Principal Research Scientist. She has also been an instructor in measurement, statistics and evaluation at the University of Rochester and at Sonoma State University and has served as a consultant to the California State Department of Education and to other states in designing their evaluation programs.
She is a native of Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California, and the fourth generation of her family to live in Sonoma County.