Are you aware of the local geography where your ancestor lived? Having access to maps is a great help, but having a certain amount of information “in your head” can save time. For your city ancestors do you know the “name of the neighborhood” (if there was one)? Do you know names of nearby neighborhoods and towns? How close did your family live to the line that divided one city from another? For rural ancestors the same thing applies? What were the names of adjacent townships? How close were they to the county line? Did they live in a part of the county that had a nickname (perhaps based upon where most residents were originally from)? Failing to know some local geography may cause you to look in […]
The grandson left Christmas goodies for Santa on an old cookstove that originally belonged to his great-great-grandparents. The picture actually taken included the entire stove and the entire grandson and was appropriately labeled and identified. Everyone was named in the caption. The words “Mom,” “Dad,” “Grandma,” etc. were not used. Names were used along with years of birth and death where appropriate, for example: Ida (Trautvetter) Neill [1910-1994] Keith Neill [1941-2022] What little I know about the cookstove’s origins–that it belonged to my grandparents, that my Mom had it cleaned up and painted in the early 2000s, and that my parents had it in their home until they passed–was included. No pronouns were used in the description as sometimes “he,” “she,” “they,” etc. do not always clearly indicate […]
Sometimes we need a different perspective. I’m not certain the rotating paper to landscape will solve all my problems, but I’m willing to try. There are times when I’m taking notes (or transcribing a document by hand) and I would like more room on a line. So after seeing a friend purchase some of these, I decided to try them for myself. I’m not certain I needed the different colors, but on a whim I ordered them. Actually the different colors might be helpful when taking notes on a research trip as I could use different colors for different families, types of records, or whatever. Color could be a sorting mechanism. A 90 degree rotation isn’t going to solve all my problems, but the paper is a good […]
The local newspaper gossip column from the 1920s stated that Mr. and Mrs. Dale Loren attended the funeral of “a cousin last Friday” in a town approximately thirty miles away. The cousin is not named. My first task will be to try and determine who the cousin was. The best place to start would be with local newspapers in the town where the cousin’s funeral was held. Since I have the date of the newspaper in which the funeral attendance was mentioned and that the funeral was held “last Friday,” I have an idea of when to look in the papers of that town thirty miles away. That will make it easier to potentially determine the funeral Mrs .and Mrs. Dale Loren attended. The Lorens may be mentioned […]
Reminder as we have mentioned this before: chronologies and chronological order can be helpful in sorting out your ancestor and her records. Put the dates of events in your ancestor’s life in chronological order. This can be a good way to very quickly get a broad overview of what you know about the ancestor and see potential gaps in time where no records have been located. The scaffold of a chronology can be a starting point to writing an ancestral biography. You may even want to include more than just one ancestor in a chronology–perhaps an entire family or a few key relatives. Putting documents from a military pension, court case, probate file, etc. in chronological order can also help you to see the flow of process and […]
There are quite a few things to think about before posting that genealogy query mentioned in an old post on our Rootdig blog. Feel free to add comments or additional ideas there.
When explaining something to someone or creating a post, make certain that you include all relevant detail. In an old tip regarding the “parents’ home,” it wasn’t mentioned that the father had died nearly ten years before the daughter married and that the mother had moved over 100 miles away shortly after his death. The parental home the daughter lived in was one where her mother had lived, but the father never had. But be careful when deciding what is relevant and what is not. The weather on the day your ancestor was supposed to get married could impact the marriage and may be relevant. The fact there was a wine stain on the altar carpet and your father noticed it during the ceremony probably isn’t.
There are several sites where complete digital copies of out-of-copyright books can be downloaded. Some of the main sites are: Archive.org Google Books Hathitrust FamilySearch There are others–feel free to put your favorite in the comments. Not all sites have the same books and some sites have better scans than others.
From a while back.. Every record fits in a larger chain of events and records. When you locate a document always ask yourself: was this document created as the result of some life event that might have created other records? were other documents created that might have caused this document to have been created? would this document have caused other records to have been created? what would have happened to my relative for this record to have been created? No record was created in a vacuum. Don’t analyze it in one either.
I’m glad that others want to share Genealogy Tip of the Day with others. However, I do request that you share in such a way that credits Michael John Neill as the author and Genealogy Tip of the Day as the site of publication. We don’t require payment to reprint or re-use tips. Our suggested citation is actually pretty simple. This tip appeared in Genealogy Tip of the Day (www.genealogytipoftheday.com) by Michael John Neill on 24 December 2022 (or whatever date it was). That’s all. I’ve seen newsletters fill entire pages with our tips–which is fine–except there was no author name, date, or original source of publication. That’s not so fine. The tips are distributed freely (and I’m happy to do so), but they do help drive traffic on our site to things that […]
If your relatives were farmers who owned their own land, do you know how the sections within a township are numbered? Knowing where your relative’s property fits in relationship to others can help you know how close they really live. Not all bordering sections have adjacent numbers. The GLO Primer will give you a broad overview.
When was the last time you took a good look at research you did in the “early days” of your research? There may be statements that you never found any source for, conclusions that no longer stand up to analysis, confusing concepts that you know understand, or leads that you realize you never worked up. In short…there could be a lot of new work sitting in that “old work.”
If you’ve been experimenting with a database search in order to finally locate that elusive ancestor, have you made certain that there is not something from a previous search hiding in a box? If there is an option to clear out previous searches, that’s often a good idea if you’ve been looking for multiple people in multiple ways in the same database.
If you are looking for things to “jog memories” of either yourself or relatives, think about how really cold or really warm temperatures were dealt with “back in the day.” Thinking about how you kept warm could get a whole flood of memories started. Speaking of floods, if your family survived one of those that is something to ask about as well.
Did you know the 1880 census asks if the person was married within the census year? A list of US census questions is on the census.gov website.
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