When I was very young, Thanksgiving meant lots of food, visits with grandparents, dressing up like a Pilgrim, and making hand turkeys with multi-colored construction paper at school. Things were certainly simpler as a child. I enjoy those fond Thanksgiving memories.
As I’ve grown and as life has become more complicated, Thanksgiving means quite a bit more. I started [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]