I recently ordered a birth certificate for a client’s ancestor who was believed to be born in Tennessee. After the usual wait time I received a certified record of “no record found.” Before simply accepting that the record was a lost cause, I took a few steps to determine the search parameters that the Tennessee [...]

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 [...]

Most people know more about their family history than they think they do. I often run into clients who assure me that the minimal information they’ve provided is ALL they know. Usually after a brief review of their information, I come up with several questions that I think they can probably answer. They usually can.
I [...]

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 [...]

Last week I was researching an Irish family. From the 1911 census, I knew that Michael was married to Mary, was born in County Westmeath in about 1850, was married before 1892 (oldest living child was born 1892), and I knew the names of their living children. My plan was to go after the couple’s [...]

Searching for a birth or death record in Arizona? The Arizona Department of Health Services has made it very easy with their online “Arizona Genealogy Birth and Death Certificates” website.  This site allows access to the digitized images of county or state issued birth and death certificates. You can search the database for births that [...]

Generally in Mexican research, Catholic parish records are consulted first because people were more consistent in baptizing their children within a few months of the child’s birth than they were in registering their children’s births with the civil authorities. However, when doing research in big cities, plowing through the hundreds and even thousands of baptismal [...]

This lucky grandmother has a brand new grandson! The morning of his birth I received a text that my daughter was at the hospital and that they expected the baby soon.  Then shortly thereafter I received a photo on my cell phone with the message, “we have a baby.” Of course, because of the prevalence [...]

A great new resource has recently become available for those of us with London ancestors. London is pretty much one of the most difficult places to research in England. This is particularly true for those whose only access to London records is the Internet. Well, at long last, there now exists a substantial database for [...]

Genealogists are on the constant search for more and more data online, but sometimes we don’t even realize what’s right under our noses. As Amanda pointed out in her blog entry last week, we don’t always know as much about the online sources as we thought we did. Well, do you know where to find [...]