I have a third-great-grandmother, Mary J. Freeman, who I recently decided to focus on in order to learn about her origins, which I only knew from census records as New York. Her husband was Royal Oliver. I found four records on FamilySearch accounting for their marriage in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1856, though they varied a [...]

Genealogy-enthusiasts will oftentimes be approached by budding researchers and asked to give lessons, crash-courses, or a few tips on tracing family trees. While there’s no official guideline for research, the following brief outline can be very helpful in introducing newbies to genealogy. It goes over a few of the basic record-categories (census, immigration, and vital records) and discusses free websites to get [...]

7 things I learned from my dad:
“If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.” My dad didn’t like hearing gossip or hearing someone speak unkindly about others. I think there must have been someone in his childhood who spent a lot of time gossiping and he ended up having a big distaste [...]

Did you know you can use Google to search a specific website? This comes in handy when you happen to find a site, such as a USGenWeb county site, that is simply a collection of web pages. It may not be very helpful for searching databases that Google doesn’t reach, such as those on Ancestry.com [...]