She has since researched her Germanic family lines into the modern-day countries of Germany, France, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Canada, and United States. Her research interests include historical geography related to genealogy, the settlement locations of Germans in the Imperial Russian Empire, and the migrations and diaspora of Russian-Germans to the present day.

Sandy is a founder and the author of the Germans from Russia Settlement Locations, a project that geolocates ancestral German colonies in the Russian Empire and its subsequent Soviet states on modern maps. She has been a speaker at international, national, and regional conferences. She is currently a member of the Black Sea German Research volunteer group and the webmaster for the Glückstal Colonies Research Association. She is also a member of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe, and the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, where she served on the editorial review board for six years.