Open a window into the daily life of your more prominent ancestors with the help of estate inventories.
Of all the pieces of evidence genealogists love, an ancestor’s probated will is one of the most prized and sought after—and the search is not without justification.
We’re all about being helpful when it comes to genealogical research, but it often takes extra effort to share our most important work.
Nothing is more characteristic of genealogists than their enthusiasm for helping others.
How often have we been surprised to find a relative in a completely unexpected place? Why were we so surprised? Where were we expecting to find him or her, and how did that expectation stand in the way of opening our minds to other possibilities?
You can find a wealth of information in even the most poorly kept old cemeteries as long as you pay careful attention to their many clues. Those clues come through gravestones and monuments, through their records, even through the placement of graves in relation to each other.
Those of us involved in family history research want to know more than the names and dates of events in our ancestors’ lives. We also want to understand our families and their experiences, to capture even the smallest insight into what life was like for them.
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Today, a computer and Internet connection are indispensable tools for most genealogists. Three years ago, DNA testing was beyond the reach, practically and economically, of genealogists.
The jury is still out on whether genealogy is a science, in spite of Val D.
It is rare not to need help at some point in your family history research. Hiring a professional may be the solution.
So you’ve mined the Internet until the wee hours in the morning? You’ve climbed up and down the ladders at the county courthouse pulling down heavy, dusty volumes? You’ve spent summer vacations trekking through abandoned cemeteries full of weeds and snakes?
There’s no question that some of the genealogical information available on the Internet is either incorrect or unreliable. But whether it’s a problem for individual researchers depends entirely on how they use it, whether they use it at all, and how they make that decision.
It remains, however, a problem for the genealogical community because the bad data continues to proliferate.
Have you ever wondered why your ancestor isn’t listed among the 66 million people indexed in the SSDI? Here’s why.
The Social Security Death Index (also known among genealogists as the SSDI) is a valuable tool for individuals researching the death information of a recently-deceased (after 1962) family member. Approximately 98 percent of the individuals in the database died after 1962.
Get everything while you’re there,” was the advice I was given many years ago when I was planning a trip to a distant repository that had a large collection of unindexed original records. Since then, I’ve given many students the same advice in hopes of saving them a costly return trip for something they overlooked. Neither my long-ago advisor nor I meant it literally of course.
