My female relatives can be as slippery as secret agents. They pop up on my radar, only to blip out again. They use nicknames, aliases, and other sorts of identity tricks. With chameleon-like proclivities, the women in my searches have pushed me to the limits of my skills and over the edge of frustration. Consider the case of my father’s cousin about whom my generation knew virtually nothing.
How did I find the family name and history of my six-times grandmother who died three hundred years ago? The legal documents of her time reveal only her married name. I credit three Ps—patience, persistence, and plenty of luck, with my success.
Ann (ca. 1630—1702), the wife of Thomas Pattison (ca.
When Sarah got home from work, she found in her mailbox a big fat envelope from a lawyer in Tulsa. After a moment of fright, she realized that it was not very likely that she was being sued by someone in Tulsa. She didn’t even know anyone who lived there. She took a deep breath. “Why are they bugging me?” she thought as she slid her longest nail under the flap and butchered the envelope.
Odd as it might sound to those not actively engaged in genealogical research, among the best places to begin discovering, exploring, and discerning the history of a community is in its cemeteries.
Places aren’t everything in family history research, but frequently they seem to come very close. With newly available digital capabilities, we can now search globally for a person’s name across a multitude of data bases.
I always wished that I were more like “Daddy”—the uncle who raised me. He must have been the most organized person I’ve ever known.
My cluttered desk stands in stark contrast to his desk. Every paper and writing tool was kept neatly and exactly where he knew to find it.
Some may feel that services and resources at the Family History Library are already among the finest offered in the world. The fact is that service delivery at the library has not changed dramatically in more than a century. We are endeavoring to create a new library that embraces the latest technology and enables researchers to experience greater success in discovering their family histories.
How do you make the world’s best genealogy library even better? That’s not an easy task, but it’s one that the leadership of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City have been working on for the past several years.
The Family and Local History Collection @ Ancestry.com
Have you ever met someone who thought getting their entire family history was as easy as performing a search on the Internet? All they would have to do is enter in their family name and voila! It magically appears.
To be a genealogist is to love libraries. The two are inseparable as peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs, or burgers and fries. However, despite a love of libraries, many genealogists do not make full use of all the resources their local library has to offer.