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 [...]

Have you created or worked with an Ancestry.com Public Member Tree lately? I have recently started one myself by uploading a Gedcom. I’ve done extensive research on a few lines, and I wanted to be able to share the information with others.
The great thing about these trees is that you can link Ancestry.com records directly [...]

I recently posted a short article relating why ProGenealogists is the ideal research team to take on our clients’ British ancestry projects. I’ve been meaning to put a brief article online on this topic for a while. At ProGenealogists, we’re invested in helping people make the next step in their family history. We find that [...]

The collection of records at Ancestry.com continues to grow. Lately Ancestry.com has begun to fill in holes for researchers who have been studying their London ancestors. Anyone with experience of London research will know just how challenging, and most of all, how time consuming it can be. The transcription of Church of England burial and [...]

There are many excellent resources out there for the genealogists studying their English heritage. We all know about sites such as Ancestry.com, FindMyPast.com and the the like. However, the English county record offices and other county-level governmental bodies are slowly but surely digitizing a great deal of old records. It is interesting that many of [...]

With the holiday season in full-swing, I thought it would be fun to use various holiday words and phrases and see if I could find people in historical records that carried these words and phrases as actual names. Here are a few that I found:
1. Mary Christmas
There are many instances of this name appearing, but [...]

I was researching a South African family the other day who did some traveling back and forth between South Africa and England. While examining a 1912 passenger arrival manifest at Southampton, UK, I noted a gentleman listed on the same manifest as the ancestral family whose occupation caught my attention. Check it out:
In case you [...]

The other day I was researching in the parish registers of St. Cuthbert’s, an Anglican church in Darlington, County Durham, England. As I was studying these registers, I came across a curious baptismal entry that was recorded in the early eighteenth century. Which of the entries do you think it is?
Look at the entry that reads “A [...]

Studying our ancestors often throws up surprises. Many of us begin the study of our genealogy with a few stories (usually of the fantastic variety) and perhaps we initially feel a little let down when we reality dawns. However, I feel that reality is often so much more interesting.
A case in point is a family [...]

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 [...]