My daughter Carol  and I went to the Provo City Cemetery this weekend. The best thing about the visit was seeing the current trend in grave decoration—Halloween pumpkins.  Halloween is my favorite holiday and as a genealogist, I love graveyards, so naturally, I loved that many of the graves were decorated with pumpkins. Their happy [...]

It happens every year and for some, every quarter. The saying goes that there is nothing more certain than death and taxes. We all hate having the government reach into our pockets and take our cash, but for those of us who love genealogy and family history, the tax man can be a real boon [...]

Several years ago, the small company I was working for purchased various items for our move into a new office building. We spent a day getting our files organized, our favorite colors of sticky notes arranged on our desks, and building smaller pieces of office furniture we needed to make the office functional and efficient.
My [...]

I recently posted about the genealogical value of newspapers, and how newspapers can add a lot of life to our ancestors. In my experience, this has been particularly true of newspapers that have been indexed. Instead of just relying on the vital dates about my ancestors to look for applicable articles, I can find any [...]

Are privacy laws a stumbling block for you in your 21st and 20th century research? They often block us, too.
Sometimes our clients know very little about their ancestry. One client’s grandfather died tragically, and the father did not talk to the his son (our client) about that side of the family. Another client found out [...]

The average age of the people employed at ProGenealogists, Inc. is roughly 36.6. Half of us are under the age of thirty. Yes, I am in the younger category, and I am proud to be a young adult Genealogist. More and more young genealogists are cropping up all the time, and it makes me giddy [...]

I’ve always enjoyed using newspapers to do genealogical research. There’s something about scrolling through rolls of microfilm and looking at the advertising while searching for the marriage announcements and obituaries of my ancestors. The articles and advertising provide great context for the time periods in which my ancestors lived, not to mention that some of [...]

I was recently “over my head” in tracing the origins of some former slaves – that is, “over my head” in both the sense that slave research is difficult (emotionally and academically) and the research was even more complicated because of the specific goal the client had in mind.
While I can’t help anyone with the [...]

ProGenealogists features a diverse group of genealogists specializing in European research – from Ireland to Germany, Italy and Russia - among many other countries. Yet, ProGenealogists is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sometimes I speak with people who wonder how we can be such experienced experts in European research if we live in the American [...]

Genealogists live and die by records and their contents. That’s why it’s critical to fully understand the nature of any kind of record we search. Too often, if we don’t find the person we’re looking for in a record, we walk away and don’t always understand whether or not the person should have even been [...]