Posts in January 11, 2026

I first worked on my children’s Belgian ancestors years ago when manual searches of records was the only option. When using the vital records from the 19th century, I used them the way I had other European records from the same time span. I looked in the “book” for the time period of interest and read through the entries for the years I thought included the person’s birth date. Then, if I had the correct person and had the names of the parents, I scanned the years before and after the birth to locate siblings. I began my searches of these records using the same approach. I had never used the records before, but knew from the catalog description they were organized chronologically so I would use the […]