I recently read someone post that they had digitized all the census photocopies they had made early in their research. Preservation is good and we all digitize what we have, but if you’ve got a great quantity of material, there are some things to preserve digital images or records of first: Federal census records are readily available digitally in a variety of places. An old family history published in the 1880s may already be online on multiple websites. Those letters from great-grandma? Those pictures from that 1920 family reunion? They may only exist in your collection. Preservation and digitization should initially concentrate on what you have that’s unique. I have a copy of a family history of one of my families published in the early 1980s. I could […]
Keep a document that has a listing of the various ways your various ancestral names can actually be pronounced. A list of spellings is not a bad idea either but knowing various ways a name could have been said can be helpful as well.
How many of your ancestral homes are still standing? How many do you have pictures of? For those whose ancestors were very mobile or were renters, this may be difficult to answer unless those specific residential addresses are known. For those whose ancestors tended to stay put and were landowners or homeowners, the question may be easier to answer. A follow-up question is how many of those homes were you in? For me, the home I grew up in is still standing. The home my father grew up in is not. I’m not exactly certain where the rental farm was my mother grew up in, but I’m guessing it’s no longer standing. My maternal grandmother’s childhood home is still standing and owned by a family member. Both homes […]
In many record sets an ancestor’s name should appear only once, but there are exceptions. People get “double counted” in census records regularly–sometimes because they moved and other times because they had two residences. Sometimes it’s because a couple is really living apart and one spouse does not want to admit it to the census taker. In some cases amended birth or death certificates may be filed. This is sometimes done with birth certificates in the case of an adoption and with death certificates if the cause of death needs to be changed. People can easily be listed on property tax rolls in more than one location if they own property in more than one location. And individuals (or even couples) can appear as a bride or groom […]
Land records generally record the acquisition and disposition of land. While document recorded in the “land records” of county or jurisdiction are typically deeds transferring title to property, occasionally they are other documents that are related to the title of a piece of property. It’s not just land records that may may provide information about your ancestor and their land ownership. Property tax records (often maintained at the same jurisdictional level as land records) may indicate that the owner is deceased or that the widow or someone else is paying the taxes on the property. There may not be a deed transferring the ownership from the estate of the deceased to the heirs until years after their death. If you need to estimate a date of death for […]
When digitizing photographs, it can be temping to just focus on the humans. That can be a mistake. There can be clues to the time and place of the photograph in those non-human details. A church (or other building) in the background may help to identify the location or when the photograph was taken. Don’t remove the surrounding structures from the individuals in a photograph. Clouds and sky are usually fine to crop away.
My Aunt Adolphina, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Illinois, occasionally went by the name of Phena (or Feeny, Pheenie, Feenie, etc.). There’s one reference to her as Josephine. In over other record, she’s listed as Adolphina (or Adolphena) or one of the variants of Phena. And it got me to wondering about the Josephine. Did she tell the clerk her name was Phena (since that’s apparently when she was referred to by most relatives and friends) and the clerk assumed that her name was actually Josephine? I’m not certain, but the one reference to Josephine when all other references are to Adolphena or Feenie have me wondering. Sometimes variant spellings or names are because someone in the records office made an assumption.
Many of my ancestors settled in areas where they knew people–either family or neighbors from back home. Those connections, often combined with economic, political, or cultural changes, resulted in many of our ancestors moving. But the move might not have been in response to a neighbor or relative moving. If your ancestor apparently picked up and moved to where he knew no one, is it possible he was responding to an advertisement? Speculators, land agents, promoted their projects and developments in a variety of ways–including newspapers. It might have been an advertisement that caused your ancestor to pick up and move to where he knew no one.
If you find a relative in a court record, do you know how to search for transcripts of testimony, petitions of plaintiff, responses of defendant, and other original court documents? Entries in journals and ledgers may only be part of the record and are a great place to start, but there may be more. The difficulty is that in some cases these records were never kept in the first place or they are no longer extant. But it is worth your while to find out. The local courthouse that houses the court record you’ve found is the first place to look. Local historical/genealogical societies may be able to give some guidance in addition to locals familiar with the records. Older records may have been transferred to the appropriate […]
While working on a Virginia family at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, I located some court records that partially explained a family and their relationships. It also confused me more than I already was about a few other things. I thought if I just kept looking at the information and beat my head against the wall (so to speak), I would eventually “figure it out” and the likely scenario would dawn on me. It didn’t. Time spent drawing out the possible scenarios was better spent looking for more records, crossing sources off my search list, etc. It’s usually best to wait until the research is complete to start trying to put it all together. Of course, one is going to conjecture and speculate as new materials […]
Remember that 1 January was not always the first day of the new year. A few links with more information:
That one record you’ve found, a deed, a death certificate, a will, an estate settlement, probably was created because something else happened. For some documents it may be obvious what caused the document to have been created. But a deed? Why was the property being sold? Was the couple planning to move? Had they fallen on hard times? If a guardianship was filed and the parents were still alive, what was the reason? Was there an inheritance that someone didn’t want a parent frittering away? Always ask if what you are seeing or have located is just the shadow of a larger event. Records weren’t created in isolation. And even if you know what caused a document to have been created ask yourself what other documents might also […]
If you’re writing up the family history, what should you document and provide a citation for? Generally speaking…everything that’s not common knowledge. It’s not necessary to cite the dates of the US Civil War, the date World War I ended, or the date Pearl Harbor Was bombed and precipitated the entrance of the US into the Second World War. But if you say your relative was an abolitionist during the Civil War, that needs a source of where that information was obtained. If you say that your relative moved to Chicago after the Chicago Fire looking for work, that needs a citation. If you say your ancestor worked in the Pullman Car Works, that needs a source. Any dates of vital events need citations. Any statements regarding biological […]
The new website https://www.birls.org/ includes a searchable version of this database of more than 18 million US veterans. From the website: “The Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) database was originally created and maintained by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA). It provides an index to basic biographical information on more than 18 million deceased American veterans…The BIRLS database includes people who served in all branches of the US military, including some branches that no longer exist, such as the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) and the Army Air Corps, as well as a few associated non-military groups and government agencies, such as NOAA. “ Also included a screenshot of my uncle’s record in this database.
It’s impossible to save every family history artifact or piece of paper that comes your way. Even if you are able to save and pass on items, creating a digital book of images of your items lets more than one person at least see what the item was. There’s no need to get fancy. Simple photographs of items incorporated into a word processing document can be augmented with stories of the items. The document can be saved as a PDF file and shared with others. The text can include provenance of the item, memories of the item, who is to receive it upon your demise, etc. Actually it can include whatever you want. It can also allow you to keep images of the items you have memories of […]
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