The third chapter of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ masterful guidebook, Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources, lays out the criteria for the construction of citations. In a sense, this chapter specifies the building blocks that all citations must include in order to fully account for an historical source. And, as Ms. Mills[…]Read more
Onomastic used to mean a lexicographer who put proper nouns, such as personal names, in alphabetical lists. Then came along the twentieth century and onomastics transformed into the study of the history and origin of those proper names, under the umbrella of onomasiology, which involves comparing terminology for similar concepts. A professional who works in[…]Read more
Dr. David Dobson’s latest books concern the migration of Scots and Irish on the one hand and the Flemish Low Counties on the other. In Scottish-Flemish Links, 1100-1850, Dobson shows that the Flemish connections with Scotland can be traced from the reign of King David II, who encouraged settlement by Norman-Flemish families from England in[…]Read more
The British Army did not enlist Irish Catholics during much of the eighteenth century as they were considered likely to be unreliable when they faced the forces of Catholic countries such as France and Spain, which contained many of their countrymen. However, Irish settlers, including those exiled to British colonies, were recruited into local militias,[…]Read more
The first reviews of Dana Ann Palmer’s Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch are in, and they couldn’t be better. Linda Stufflebean writes the Empty Branches on the Family Tree blog, one of the most popular genealogy blogs on the Internet. She also monitors other postings and publishes a weekly listing of the most valuable articles[…]Read more
Elizabeth Shown Mills, the celebrated genealogist and doyen of historical citation practices, knows that most beginning genealogists will be intimidated by her magnum opus, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. New Fourth Edition. In part, this is why we have published her diminutive new book, Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and[…]Read more
You don’t need to get a law degree to be a genealogist; however, some of the words and phrases used to describe or assess sources can get technical. For example, do you know the difference between a proof argument and a proof statement? How about indirect evidence versus indirect source? And what about negative argument,[…]Read more
Throughout December we devoted considerable space in Genealogy Pointers to Dana Ann Palmers’ remarkable new book, the Ultimate Guide to Mastering FamilySearch. In the process, we emphasized the vastness of FamilySearch itself and the fact that anyone can use it at no cost. Although we don’t have the time to go into it here, under[…]Read more
The March 2025 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly features positive reviews of three recent Genealogical.com titles: New York in 1698: A Comprehensive List of Residents, Based on Census, Tax, and Other Lists, by Kory L. Meyerink; The Complete Guide to Family TreeDNA: Y-DNA, Mitochondrial, Autosomal and X-DNA, by Roberta Estes; and The Complete[…]Read more
Elizabeth Shown Mills latest book, Your Stripped Bare Guide to Citing and Using History Sources fulfills two goals: On the one hand, it replaces Ms. Mills first book on documentation, the 1997 guide to source evaluation and citation, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian, as a simple, portable text. On the other hand,[…]Read more
