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.
A reminder about relationships: If A and B are both related to C, that does not mean that A and B are necessarily related to each other. A and B could be related, but they do not have to be related to each other simply because they share C as a relative. My Mom and my Dad were both related to a person named Mary Anne. My Mom and Dad were not related to each other at all. Mom was related to Mary Anne’s dad and my Dad was related to Mary Anne’s mother. Always stop and think about what relationships are implied by relationships and which relationships are not. And remember–sometimes our own family makes good examples and sometimes they do not.
The checks don’t indicate what they were for, but a little work made it clear that they were written to pay for my father’s birth. My Dad was born on 14 April 1941 and the first check (22 April 1941) was written to the St. Joseph’s Hospital where he was born. The check from 15 April was written out to Dr. C. A. Runyon–the doctor who delivered my Dad according to his birth certificate. Less direct evidence was the fact that these two checks were tucked into an envelope that was in an album of childhood pictures and other items from my father’s childhood and high school years. It seems reasonable that someone (likely my grandmother) put the checks in dad’s album because they were written when he […]
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