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 [...]

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) is the main repository of genealogically relevant records for the six counties of Northern Ireland, and it also holds records pertinent to the whole historical province of Ulster (nine counties). The PRONI facility on Balmoral Avenue, Belfast, closed in September and is scheduled to reopen on 30 [...]

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 [...]

I spent the better part of an afternoon last week transcribing some land patents from colonial Virginia. While reading the documents, I let my mind transport me to the land. I imagined two or three men out walking the land measuring out the distance in poles and choosing landmarks to identify the boundaries and mark [...]

Freeholder records are a record source that likely seems pretty obscure to most researchers. Many people probably have never heard of a freeholder. However, we have made an inventory of freeholders, freemen, and voting records for Ireland available on our web site. I compiled this inventory because there wasn’t a good overall inventory of where freeholder [...]

So here is a helpful tip I thought I would pass along. One of my colleagues recently brought this cool online tool to my attention. This site allows you to view township and range grids on Google Earth maps.
Land records are often times used when tracing your ancestry, but sometimes the information is not all [...]