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 […]
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Category: General Research
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, […]
Why You Must Use JSTOR In Your Genealogy
If you aren’t using JSTOR already for your genealogical research, you will be once you finish reading this post. I absolutely love this resource. JSTOR is a database of academic journals, books, and primary sources. As such, it contains thousands of articles on subjects directly relevant to genealogical research. Articles might be 4 pages or […]
Finding Living Descendants
Happy New Year everybody! I haven’t posted in a long while because I’ve been busy giving genealogy webinars, managing a child in remote learning, and going back to work myself. The silver lining during the past year has been the webinars I’ve launched. I’ve seen an amazing response and more are to come. I plan […]
3 Reasons Why Your Research Is Stuck
We are excitedly researching our grandmother’s family, or our grandfather’s military service, or finding great-aunts and great-uncles we never knew existed. We are bursting with the joy of new discoveries. That’s when it happens. We just get stuck. Don’t know where to go next. Don’t know how to move forward. Can’t find the answers we […]
8 Research Ideas for the Shut-In
Normally I’d be excited to have some time off work because I’d be at the Archives or Historical Society. But, of course, like most of us I can’t do that. Fortunately, there are still plenty of things we can do to further our research. In this stressful time, when many of us must find ways […]
A Cold Case Solved
The 1920 household of Abe and Mary Ella (Fendricks) Copeland in Hardin County, Tennessee indicates four children: Myrtle, O.D., Robie, and Jo K[ate]. Mary Ella was the sister of my great-grandmother Effie Fendricks. The Problem and A Story I have never been able to find the daughter named “O.D. Copeland” in anything other than […]
Postcards Provide Clues to Family
I am fortunate to have copies of postcards that some of my ancestors sent. They are a wonderful artifact to have for genealogy, as are handwritten letters. They can also be used effectively to solve research problems. The Harbour Family: A Stubborn Problem Hannah Harbour had two children, Doss and Odie, with her first husband […]
Murder in the Family
Violence is certainly not something our generation invented. Murder is not new. There have been many surprises for me over the years of my genealogy research. One is how many instances I discovered that involved murder. Strange, odd and sad, but true. I’m going to try my best not to read anything too deep into […]
Fall In Love With Libraries Again
Oh, my fellow genealogists. We have become blinded by the light, we have taken the wooden nickel. Ancestry. Familysearch. Fold3. Any digital archives. We have left our strong and steady marriage for a fling on the wild side. I’m talking about libraries. Good old faithful brick and mortar libraries. Now, I will be the first […]