Recently when I was doing German parish research at the Family History Library, I heard a woman’s voice with a slight accent thanking someone for their help with someone else’s research problem.  It sounded like they were working to identify the family’s place of origin and they had either eliminated some of the possible locations [...]

Shhhh! I have a secret that I want to share with you. But don’t. tell. anyone. If I’m in a hurry to get a death certificate that isn’t available at the Family History Library, I’ll often order it from Vitalchek.com. This can be difficult sometimes because they ask for a specific date of death in [...]

My daughter Carol  and I went to the Provo City Cemetery this weekend. The best thing about the visit was seeing the current trend in grave decoration—Halloween pumpkins.  Halloween is my favorite holiday and as a genealogist, I love graveyards, so naturally, I loved that many of the graves were decorated with pumpkins. Their happy [...]

Are privacy laws a stumbling block for you in your 21st and 20th century research? They often block us, too.
Sometimes our clients know very little about their ancestry. One client’s grandfather died tragically, and the father did not talk to the his son (our client) about that side of the family. Another client found out [...]

Genealogists live and die by records and their contents. That’s why it’s critical to fully understand the nature of any kind of record we search. Too often, if we don’t find the person we’re looking for in a record, we walk away and don’t always understand whether or not the person should have even been [...]

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 [...]

I updated our U.S. Genealogy Sleuth pages today! Wow, there are so many new resources being brought online regularly. This week saw the presentation of New Mexico Death Records 1889-1945, Massachusetts Death Records 1841-1915, Delaware State Birth Records 1861-1908 and Rhode Island State Census Records for 1915.
The Genealogy Sleuth is a page that we use [...]