It was while recently writing about Mike Fendricks’ family that I made one of the biggest discoveries in 25 years. I recovered the identity of my 2nd great-grandmother, an enslaved woman named Salina Sherrod. It was my favorite gift this year! This discovery illustrated two concepts I often recommend. First, everyone should write up their […]
Proving Relationships: One Strategy
Part of the joy of researching my family has always been the challenge of proving relationships once the “easy” records that state relationships don’t exist anymore. (In genealogical parlance this means once we don’t have direct evidence.) When we don’t have birth and death certificates that name parents, marriage records that provide maiden names, or […]
Never Trust Only One Source
Webinar Note: My next webinar is a two-hour lecture + workshop on Deed Records. It will be held on August 20, 1-3:30 pm EST, and is $20. It includes a free PDF guide to Using Deed Records which is a $12 value for every attendee. Click this link to register. When we first start […]
Two Men Become One: Identity
Proving that the sources we find are actually about the person we are researching, and not some same-named individual takes skill and time. Online databases will happily offer up records with these same-named people; the prudent researcher should never believe them without scrutiny. Additionally, the constant shift in records between use of first names, nicknames […]
Supreme Court Records
Court Records have been a favorite source of mine for many years. Several of my earliest lectures focused on using this source, and recently I created a Beginner’s Guide to Court Records to introduce new researchers to their use. Many of the richest records that mention our ancestors are found in the records of the […]
A Genealogy Research Checklist
The beginning of the year is always a good time to reassess and track progress in genealogy. Below, I offer a checklist of questions that you can apply to any line of your family. My hope is that this list can help frame some of the goals for your research this year. Research Checklist 1. […]
Make a Locality Guide!
Have you ever considered making a locality guide for your research? What is a locality guide, you say? It’s a document you create that contains key snippets of information relevant to genealogical research in a specific locale. The idea is to have one central guide that you can refer to time and time again when […]
New Work on Free African Americans
Paul Heinegg has done it again. He’d already spent decades of his life compiling information about free African Americans during the colonial era in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. He mined some of the most challenging record sets in genealogy—scant and hard-to-read court records, tax records, fragments of colonial census records, […]
Those Doggone Nicknames
My collateral ancestor Mintie was called by her middle name Lucinda in almost every record during her lifetime *except* the bible record above and one census: Nicknames, middle names and initials will get you every time in genealogical research. They still get me every now and then and it kinda drives me just a little […]
She Might Not Be a Widow
Before I get into this post, I want to let you know how excited I am about the next webinar I’ll be presenting on Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 1:00 pm EST. Aaron Dorsey and I will be presenting on Finding the Last Slaveowner: Guidance and Case Studies, and this will be a 2-hour extended […]