Genealogy Articles

Except When You Can’t! You Hit a Brick Wall and Need To Take a Flying Leap Over the Wall, Through the Wall, Around the Wall. You dearly hope a hypothesis will catapult you over the wall or at least build a bridge to the middle of it so you can connect back […]

Bible records can resolve so many questions if the entries were kept contemporaneously with the events they chronicle. Transcriptions and digitizations need to include title pages, family pages, pages of insertions, copies of the insertations and photographs of the spine and boards. Transcriptions also need to include all the data, […]

Preservation vs. Access Where would historians be if families across the country had not contributed their massive manuscript collections to various repositories over the last four hundred years? I wrote a lecture about finding the right repository for your family letters, manuscripts, artifacts and bibles. The National Union Catalog of Manuscript […]

Step-Family vs. Nuclear Family Research Describing a family, most people start with the parents, father, mother, then children oldest to youngest, finishing up with the baby. This is true today, and was true 200 years ago. It is a logical linear listing and works great for nuclear families undisturbed by […]

Last Names – Surnames Compound word surnames have idiosyncrasies which create indexing and researching issues in records across the United States. This is true when compound word surnames are misunderstood like many Spanish names that consist of two surnames, a paternal and maternal surname in that order. Just to make […]

Posh or Equality or Custom In England double barreled surnames are perceived as posh while in America the trend from marriages in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, was for socially aware, independent, liberal thinkers to combine their surnames in a meaningful way to connect their newly created family, parents and […]

Flitting, also known as theTraditional Moving Day, was April 1st in Pennsylvania Reading Eagle, Mon., 31 March 1884 p. 3, Womelsdorf. Renters can be more elusive to research than homeowners purely because of a lack of centralized lease repository comparable to the Register of Deeds or Recorder’s Office for land […]

Genealogical Quilt Books Luckily for us, my mother gave us a beautiful quilt as a wedding present, made by her grandmother Flora Anna Coogle Armstrong, and great grandmother Minnie Araminta Sibert Coogle. My mother set aside one for each of us. When my nieces and nephews were born in the […]

Genealogy Reference Books Outdated with the advent of the Internet? What books do you still keep at hand with the awesome research power of the Internet at your fingertips? Many genealogical books are worth the price of a hardback to have at your fingertips for reference at home even with […]

Genealogical, historical and research web sites I use every day or almost every day are listed as favorites or bookmarks on my browsers: Ancestry Google News Archives FindAGrave FamilySearch HeritageQuest NewsBank Google Books Then there are web sites I use every week which hold various state’s records including some digitized […]

Name Clusters and Namesakes Given names patterns can lead researchers both backward and forward. Check all grandchildren and grandparents for naming clues and possibly great-grandchildren and great-grandparents. Name clusters offer heritage traces, just as namesakes do. If you are lucky, the family always includes a Harmon or Rebecca in their […]

Given names can be so important in family research. Examining family names for three or more generations can give clues to who was important, who was beloved and who wasn’t, especially if the family included some unusual names. A family consisting of William, John, Thomas, James, Mary, Anna, Sarah and […]

How to Research a Brown line or Hints for Researching Common Surnames When bringing the Henritze line in America forward from Balthaser Henritze and Dorothea (Rapp) Henritze of Reading, there is one daughter who married Conrad Braun, son of Matthias and Maria Braun. Unless the line dies out, there is […]

Researching in military records comes to mind around Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. In the genealogical community, one of the more frequently researched series of records are the Revolutionary War Pension Application Files from the National Archives Record Group 15, M804, roughly 80,000 pension applications, 2670 microfilm reels, […]

From Adoption to the Witness Protection Program Surnames are deliberately changed in the United States by usage or by law for a multitude of reasons. As far as genealogical and historical research goes, surnames also evolve and are mistaken for different names on an ongoing basis. Read the article on […]

“My family has ALWAYS spelled our name this way, so that can’t be the right record.” How many times have you heard that from another researcher or even thought that about one of your own surnames? In addition to being mangled on a daily basis because of other people’s perceptions […]

Titles Aren’t Big in America It’s definitely not part of our American heritage to have aristocratic titles, though it is and has been part of the heritage of many countries that contributed boats and boats of immigrants, Britain, Germany, Ireland, France, Spain, etc. A title infers a position, while a […]

My Top Ten Personal Favorite Genealogical Research Libraries   I love libraries and try stop by to visit even the smallest library when I travel. If the library is having a book sale that day, all the better for me. When I am lucky enough to be in a large […]

What to Do While Waiting for the Mail to Arrive (a continuation of Start With What You Know) Family History   –   Tennie Bray   –   Part Two You have interviewed every family member who will still talk to you. You have researched all available census years. You have located all the […]