Ancestry Magazine

Celebrating the Family: The MyFamily.com Guide to Understanding Your Family History
By the editors of MyFamily.com. Friedman/Fairfax, 2002. 256 pages. Softcover. $19.95 s/h. Order at http://shops.ancestry.com

Celebrating the Family is an introduction to nine diverse areas of family history, including photograp hy safeguards and preservation, scrapbooking, interviewing, researching and writing a family history, communicating with family through letters or e-mail, and planning reunions. Projects to encourage children to understand and appreciate their unique heritage are grouped by ages (stories for the young, and assignments for the not-so-young). One chapter focuses on genetics. The reader learns the basics of genetic inheritance, how to find one’s family’s health history, and clues to identify at-risk relatives.

Encouraging first-hand accounts appear in the text, along with tips and examples to clarify concepts and procedures. Basic forms are provided along with addresses and websites for more in-depth investigation. Reading this book is sure to inspire you with ideas for your next family history project.

Discovering the History of Your House
By Betsy J. Green. Santa Monica Press, 2002. 286 pages. Softcover. $14.95 plus s/h. Order at www.santamonicapress.com

From 1908 to 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 100,000 homes by catalog. There were nearly 450 different styles, ranging from “modest cottages and farmhouses, to elaborate Colonial Revival homes.” Sears cut the lumber to size at the factory, then numbered each piece for assembly.

That’s just one of the interesting tidbits acquired from this user-friendly text. There are good suggestions for house-history hunts, such as looking in the newspaper at the time your house was built for published building plans, which was a common practice especially during the building boom of the 1920s.

Genealogists will want to turn first to the chapter, “Curious About the History of Your Land?” Here you will find tips to platting land and using landowner maps and agricultural censuses.

Your Guide to Cemetery Research
By Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. Betterway Books, 2002. 263 pages. Softcover. $19.99 plus s/h. Order at www.familytreemagazin e.com

One glance through Your Guide to Cemetery Research and the page-turning begins. Before you know it, you are learning about death records and how to locate graves, search a cemetery, discover cryptic clues, and use burial and funeral customs to understand the era in which your ancestor was interred.

A chapter on cemetery projects and preservation, and appendixes covering gravestone art and symbols, diseases and disasters, and terms used for causes of death will probably answer questions generated by your own cemetery escapades.

The text is informative and enjoyable, and the many photographs of century-spanning tombstones are enlightening. Adding to the enjoyment are researcher contributions of unusual, sometimes humorous, gravesite experiences or discoveries.

Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses 1790-1920 By William Thorndale and William Dollarhide. Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 2002 reprint of 1987 edition. 420 pages. Softcover. $39.95 plus s/h. Order at www.genealogical.com

The explosion of online census images and indexes makes census records easily accessible and easy to use. But easy-to-use does not always mean easy-to-understand. Consider, for example, county border changes. The basic geographical unit of census-taking has always been the county. Viewing county boundaries for the census time period is often crucial to finding a household.

In this work, maps are arranged by state and then by decade. The lines drawn for each particular decade are overlaid onto 1920 county outlines, which is a helpful feature. This shows that 1820 Randolph County Illinois, for example, covers part of the 1920 counties of Perry and Randolph. An index identifies present-day U.S. counties and nearly all defunct or later renamed counties. Mapping pitfalls are given along with surprises the authors encountered as they researched this book. The bibliography identifies the general and specific sources used by the authors. This a ll adds up to one fine census research tool.

Pennsylvania German Pioneers, Two volumes.
By Margaret Peckham Motes. Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., reprint 2002. 891 pages. Indexes. Hardcover. $75 plus s/h. Order at www.genealogical.com

William Penn needed settlers for his 40,000 acres of New World land. From the Rhine provinces, he invited those being persecuted to join him in a more tolerant state. From 1683 until the early nineteenth century, the Palatines came. As foreigners, they took oaths of allegiance to the British crown, which were followed in two years by oaths of fidelity to the proprietor.

In this publication, the surviving oath lists and the extant ship passenger lists are joined by a number, then assigned an a, b, or c to designate the origin. More than 500 of these combined lists, retrieved from state archives, identify 38,000 immigrants and give names of ships, dates of arrival, and in some cases, places of origin. Although women and children did not take the oaths, their names appear on the ships’ lists.

Sandra H. Luebking, FUGA, a genealogical and historical lecturer and researcher, is the editor of the FORUM Magazine and co-editor of The Archives and the revised edition of the The Source.