I just returned from a trip to visit my family in Dallas. Since I last visited my parents, they moved, and in their move they discovered boxes upon boxes of pictures that they had forgotten about. Most of these pictures were of our immediate family members, but there were quite a few of grandparents, cousins, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I am not one of those fortunate people who has located diaries or letters written by my ancestors. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found lots of good resources on some of my ancestors, like really colorful newspaper articles. But so far I haven’t identified any journals or personal histories. As I’ve lamented this fact over [...]

If you are anything like we are, you are probably addicted to the Family History Library Catalog. We check the catalog multiple times a day in our research, primarily so we can develop our research plans. It isn’t often that the catalog is down, but when it does happen, it can really thwart our research. [...]

I got involved in genealogy when I was 20. I had always been interested in flipping through the pedigree charts and family group sheets that my brother had compiled as a Christmas gift for our mom several years ago, but the actual research was a mystery to me. Once I started learning how to research, [...]

Sometimes in research we are so focused on the ancestral line that we neglect some of the collateral lines. It’s really a shame, too, because these collateral lines can sometimes provide excellent gems of information.
I was recently researching in the Ohio death records available on the New FamilySearch Pilot. (I’ve already gone into my thoughts [...]

I had a discussion once about how many people claim “American” as their ancestry on the U.S. census. This person felt that this was a sign of how many people didn’t know where their ancestry originated. I took it as a sign of a lot of people feeling they are not English [...]

A librarian friend of mine recently shared on Facebook this opinion piece about the inevitable future demise of brick and mortar libraries. Of course, my librarian friend and all her fellow library-loving friends (including myself) had lots to say about this piece. And while the article does make excellent points about the accessibility of handy [...]