For so many people, the excitement and passion surrounding family history is the quest of discovering who their ancestors really were. What did my great-great-grandfather think of farming?
While most of us think of divorces as modern-day inventions, actually they have been around a long time in America. As early as 1639 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Luxford’s wife asked for a divorce because James already had another wife. A magistrate granted the divorce, took the now-former Mrs.
While energetic youth rarely look forward to the beginning of school in the late summer, genealogists should still take note: due to the types of records and publications schools generate and the importance of schools in communities, school records are a valuable resource. Among the more commonly used school records are attendance rolls and grade registers.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Pacific Ocean has drawn Americans to it with an inescapable pull. Our ancestors walked and rode, measured and staked, dug and looted, and burned and planted all the way from Maine to California in their quest to find fortunes, make homes, and explore proverbial greener pastures. Fortunately for us, they documented their treks, too.James A.
Home is where the heart is—especially in successful genealogical pursuits.Advances in technology have provided us with remarkable databases of millions of names and an almost equal number of document images. Web pages and intuitive search interfaces are valuable to both novice and experienced researchers.
While strictly speaking, fraktur refers to an ornate type of written or printed German (similar to Gothic lettering). It has become a generic term for the colorfully embellished German-American manuscripts that recorded births, baptisms, and marriages. They are now prized by folk-art collectors as well as by genealogists.
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.
It is a biological fact that we have an equal number of male and female ancestors. Yet it is an historic truth that there are never as many records for the females as the males in our ancestry. It’s the reason we reach so many dead ends and leave more barren branches on the right side of our family tree than the left.
An in-depth exploration of the offerings at FamilySearch reveals much more than the library catalog you’ve come to appreciate.
Today’s family historians have a great advantage over the researchers of yesteryear in the quantity and quality of information that is as close to them as a keystroke and an Internet connection.
A bountiful harvest of relationships and background material await the careful researcher who investigates published family histories.
Genealogy librarians immediately recognize someone new to family history research when they’re asked, “Do you have the book about my family?”
There are two problems with this question.
