I’ve been conducting slave research on my family and teaching others how to do it for about 18 years now. There are a few points I tend to mention repeatedly on Reclaiming Kin, but thought it would be a good idea to list them all in one place. Especially for beginners, there are some things […]
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Category: Tips and Training
What is Genealogy “Methodology”?
Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post about slavery and slaveowners. If anything, it kicked off some great discussions and dialogue about the country’s worst and most contentious period of history. I’ll leave that topic with one quote from one of our greatest slavery historians, Ira Berlin: No understanding of slavery can avoid these themes: […]
Why We Need To Cite Our Sources
Sometimes it can seem as if there is a civil war going on in the genealogical community. After we start researching our families, at some point we hear about the necessity of source citations. Once we figure out exactly what they are, some of us think, “That looks complicated. I don’t have time to do […]
Shaky Leaves and the Importance of Thoro...
We’ve all seen those shaky leaves on Ancestry. For a long time, I never clicked on them. But last year I found some treasures hidden within the hints, so now I periodically investigate all those shaky leaves. Earlier this week, I found a leaf for Syvoid Holt, a collateral ancestor. The leaf linked to an […]
Formulating Research Questions
Following a repeatable process to guide our genealogy research can make all the difference in how successful our we are. The always-waiting alternative is burial among all the papers and files that accumulate over the years.Nobody wants that. There are so many things I wish I could whisper to my 1997 self when I first set out on this […]
Analyzing and Correlating Records
We have to continue pushing ourselves to improve our research skills. As beginners, we often look up our family names in search boxes and indexes. We quickly find the “low-hanging” fruit. It’s what the Genealogy Gods use to suck you into this hobby;) The tough stuff comes when the records relevant to your family have […]
7 Ways to Jumpstart Your Research
No, you’re not going crazy. This list started out as 5 Ways but has now grown to 7 Ways;) I’ve been looking for an excuse to post this picture of myself with my older brother, so this is as good a time as any. It puts me in the Christmas spirit. We’re headed into the holiday […]
Cluster Research at the Cemetery
Recently, I decided to revisit my Prather family’s historic cemetery in Montgomery County, Maryland. The church was then called Brooke Grove Methodist Church, and is on Maryland’s Inventory of Historic Properties. I discussed in a previous post how useful these types of databases can be. Brooke Grove was built after the Civil War by a […]
Do You Have an Artificial Brick Wall?
My friend Aaron calls them artificial brick walls. They can also be called self-imposed brick walls. We say this to mean we have labelled something a brick wall that really isn’t a brick wall. We call them that even though we haven’t done our due diligence in terms of careful research. Consider these examples: Insufficient Research We […]
Researching Free Blacks
There is a good probability that many of us researching African-American families will find at least one line that was freed before 1865. A Brief History In 1860, there were over 400,000 free blacks in the U.S. This map (from the Schomburg migrations website) shows the numbers of free blacks in each state: Although Northern […]