I’ve recently started reading a book by my great-grandfather. It is a biographical book about how the events in his life brought him to his rather liberal political ideas. As I’ve read the book, I’ve let out a few sighs at how little family history information the book includes. I have to keep reminding myself [...]

Inspired by her love of genealogy, retired librarian, Mollie, began to develop a searchable website for free online books nearly three years ago.  After gathering nearly 5,000 links she very generously put it on the web in December 2007, entitled Genealogy Book Links. Since that time it has grown to contain nearly 20,000 titles with 7,500 in the [...]

Recently I spent a lot of time poring over probate records. One particular entry caught my eye. It was a receipt turned in to the court by a guardian for items he had purchased for a child. Among the shoes and the gloves was “a pair of plaid pantaloons!” Can’t you just picture them? Bear [...]

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time with my church youth group. We liked to do service projects, but we often had a hard time organizing projects that were useful, engaging and could be done in a few hours with lots of people. One of my favorite service projects involved our group cleaning [...]

Recently I’ve rediscovered the joys of city directories. A city directory makes a wonderful census substitute in non-census years. Bear in mind however, that directories, like most records we find for our ancestors, are male oriented. The person usually listed is only the head of household and as you know more often than not that [...]

Continuing our role as “volunteer editor” for Family Tree Magazine’s recently released annual list of “101 Best Websites” for 2010, here are some sites the editors should (and may) have considered this year:
“Best Sites for Western US Research”
The ten websites in the magazine’s list are very helpful, yet they cover only four states, a major [...]

By now you have probably heard that Ancestry.com has acquired ProGenealogists. If you missed the announcement on Friday, you can read more about it here. (I’ve also included the text from that site below, in case you want to save yourself the extra click!) We are really thrilled about this new step for both companies.
Dear [...]

Some of the oldest existing vital records for Southern States research are marriage records. Laws and customs regarding marriage records and vital statistics for many of the states of the Mid-South region have roots in the Commonwealth of Virginia or North Carolina. Bordering areas of North Carolina and Virginia both influenced each other. West Virginia [...]

That’s right; ProGenealogists is sending me to jail! When we were approached by the local MDA chapter to help them raise money for Muscular Dystrophy and Jerry Lewis’s kids, how could we say no? So, I volunteered to be the jail bird, which means I need your tax-deductible help to raise bail so I can [...]