The earliest newspapers in the United States were published starting in 1720. Printing presses were heavy and had to be imported from England. Happy was the colony that could have its own newspaper. Newspapers printed local news, news from other colonies, but news from Europe often occupied the front page. Marriages and deaths of local[…]Read more
Quicksheet: The Historical Biographer’s Guide to Individual Problem Analysis, from renowned genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, addresses the nature and evaluation of evidence, not citation, thereby addressing the process of research head-on. Recognizing that solutions to tough research problems require thoughtful analysis, Mrs. Mills has designed a 10-step solution to genealogical problems to help researchers construct[…]Read more
Margaret D. Pagan’s new book, African American News in the Baltimore Sun, 1870-1927, rescues and makes available information about what was, as late as 1870, the largest urban black population in the U.S. Beginning with coverage at perhaps the high point of the Reconstruction era in the U.S., the Sun published stories about politics, education,[…]Read more
If tracing your German origins requires that you read documents written in German—if you plan to research ones from the 19th-century or earlier it’s a virtual certainty you will—Ernest Thode’s classic dictionary is one book you should own. This book is designed for the family researcher who has little or no knowledge of German but[…]Read more
Brian Mitchell’s New Pocket Guide to Irish Genealogy is a wonderful combination of how-to book, guide to sources, and case studies–in only 120 pages. It’s expert genealogist Mitchell’s contention that the most important sources for Irish genealogy are the civil registers of births, marriages, and deaths; church registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials; gravestone inscriptions;[…]Read more
Another great feature of How to find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records: A Genealogist’s Guide, by Sunny Jane Morton and Harold A. Henderson, is the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the kinds of records that were kept by the 12 major denominations in the United States as of 1900. For each denomination covered, the authors[…]Read more
If you’re still on the fence about David Dobson’s new guidebook for Scottish genealogy, Brian Mitchell’s handbook for Irish roots, or the 6th edition of Paul Heinegg’s three-volume compilation of colonial-era free African Americans from Virginia and the Carolinas, you don’t have to rely on the publisher to help you make up your mind. We […]Read more
Genealogists and historians seeking a 19th– or early 20th-century Baltimore connection will appreciate Margaret D. Pagan’s new book, African American News in the Baltimore Sun, 1870-1927. Presented as a chronology, the book contains more than 800 entries highlighting those who emerged as leaders in the fight for equal rights and opportunities as well as those[…]Read more
If you profited from reading Mr. Greenwood’s sage advice on land records and don’t as yet own a copy of his book, you may wish to read the following review from the Winter 2018-2019 issue of the St. Louis Genealogical Society Quarterly. The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. 4th edition. By Val D. Greenwood. Baltimore:[…]Read more
Since most digitized German papers are fully searchable, Ernest Thode’s revised guide to these newspapers, indicating newspaper title, place of publication, date range, and website, is an unprecedented key to a mother lode of information found in German-language papers. As the author explains below: “Few historic German newspapers have been digitized until the past few[…]Read more
For anyone interested in his or her own genealogical links to medieval Europe and early Christianity, Alan Koman’s book, A Who’s Who of Your Ancestral Saints, offers an extraordinary opportunity. In fact, Mr. Koman has retold the lives of 275 early European saints and attached to those biographies the lineages that connect the saints to[…]Read more
Now published in three volumes, and 400 pages longer than the two-volume Fifth Edition, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 consists of detailed genealogies of hundreds of free black families that originated in Virginia and migrated to North and/or South Carolina from the colonial period to[…]Read more
