An interesting thing has happened in the last few years: the explosion of social networking and social media. We have been able to be constantly updated about the activities of our friends and relatives like never before…but it’s only a 21st Century manifestation of our tendency to spy on each other.
In historical newspapers, many of [...]

An evergreen tree up the hill in the neighborhood where I grew up was decorated with hundreds of lights every year for Christmas. For decades it has been a landmark in town during the holidays, visible from a distance. It can be found on a map-painting of the city which hung in City Hall.
Last week, [...]

Genealogists often love charts. One of the first things I’m interested in when I use a new piece of genealogical software is to see what kinds of charts they can generate. A lot of us family historians are “big-picture” people who like to see everything at once, so the more ways to do it, the [...]

Among the most valuable tools a future genealogist will have is the ability to search databases which are natively digital, by which I mean the digital record is the original record. Digital records are created along with paper records these days, so whoever is using the record won’t have to read old-style or sloppy handwriting. [...]

The sources to which you can turn for genealogical information vary depending on the location and time period you are researching. For instance, if you are looking for your 18th-century relatives in the old country, you will certainly turn to parish records as a critical source of information – you won’t be able to count [...]

Sometimes people researching their family history seem to forget that there is more to their ancestors than a birth and death date. If we’re truly trying to get to know our forebears, those are among the most boring bits of information since they happen to everybody! We all descend from more fascinating people than we [...]

When you go about researching a family line, what are the first records you look at? Probably census, birth, marriage, and death records – and rightly so, since they can so neatly fill in the blanks on your charts. However, if you look at what records are available for a particular place and time, there [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I learned a very valuable family history research principle years ago, and I’ve seen its application more and more as I gain experience in genealogical research. It is a powerful tool for breaking through some brick walls.
Look in neighboring jurisdictions.
Like ourselves, our ancestors did not neatly compartmentalize themselves into cities and counties. They might live [...]