Skip to main content

Enslaved Ancestor Found Using 1914 Ad

Enslaved Ancestor Found Using 1914 Ad

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

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 […]

Two Men Become One: Identity

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

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 […]

New Work on Free African Americans

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

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

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 […]

 
0