Some records ask for “age next birthday” instead of “age now.” Make certain you are interpreting ages in documents correctly. An age that appears to be a year off may be correct.

This early 18th century estate settlement spells the word “heifer” as “effer” and it makes a good point about initial letters.

There are letters that sometimes simply get dropped when a name is written. The problem is compounded when the dropped letter is the very first one.

• Hoffman becomes Aufman or Offman
• Knight becomes Night
• Habben becomes Abben
• and so it goes…

The heifer does not care whether it is called a heifer or an effer. Your ancestor may not have cared that his last name was written as Aufman instead of Hoffman. But you will care–when you can’t find them.

If you are considering donating your genealogical material to a library or archives, ask first. Do not just make the donation in your will. Not all facilities are willing or able to take genealogical materials. Then consider or do the following:

• organize your materials. Libraries usually do not want unorganized boxes of random materials on dead people. The only people who can get by with donating unorganized materials are people who are well-known, influential, and well-connected.
• uniquify your materials. “Uniquify” is not a word, but if all your materials consist of unsourced photocopies of local records and published materials, the library may simply not want it. Even if it is organized. Ask yourself, “how unique is this material?” The more unique, the more likely a facility is to take it.
• write out conclusions. Written up summaries of information and conclusions (with cited sources)–even if not actually “published” but simply printed and bound in book form–are more likely to be accepted by a library or an archives.

My Mom and my Grandmother Ufkes probably around 1950.

If you’ve been entrusted with a family item, what have you done to preserve it?

Have you digitized the item? Identified it? Thought of ways to share it and reproduce it?

The original may be special to you, but digital or paper copies may be special to others and a good way to maximize the chance that future generations can enjoy the item as well

Our recent Rootdig posting on search results from the South Dakota Birth Certificate Index is essentially three tips:

• Babies aren’t always immediately named
• First names can be spelled a variety of ways
• People can live somewhere a short time
• A couple can be related in more than one way

Reminder:

Genealogy Tip of the Day is sponsored by GenealogyBank. In December, they are offering an annual subscription for a monthly rate equivalent to less than $5 a month!

There is still room in my December 2015 session of “US Land Records.” More details are on our announcement page–join us!

Transcriptions of documents are great and make reading the entire item and searching for specific text easy. But if your relative signed documents, there are times when those signatures need to be compared. Do you keep track of whether or not you have a known ancestor’s signature and do you try and collect as many digital images of those signatures as possible?

In tracking the movement of one relative, I finally realized that I had a “known signature” of him when he signed a son’s marriage bond and a signed document from a record that I thought was him in a location a hundred miles away. If I had “flagged” him as someone for whom I had a signature, the comparison would not have taken so long.

When transcribing old documents make certain that what is in the margin of the document as an annotation does not become part of the text of the document itself. This 1742 deed from Massachusetts has several annotations–these are made for the clerks and others using the records. They are not a part of the actual document. A transcription of these items should indicate that they were in the margin of the document. Including them right in the text may create confusion.

A reference to a woman as the “late widow” does not mean that she is deceased. There’s a good chance that the reference indicated she had remarried and was no longer single. The word “deceased” is frequently used to mean “dead.”  “Late” in this sense probably means that she was “formerly” a widow.

Her being referred to as the “late widow of Samuel Sargent” does not mean that her deceased husband had returned from the dead.

There is still room in my December 2015 session of “US Land Records.” More details are on our announcement page–join us!