English-speaking researchers and historians working with Spanish documents, as well as native speakers unfamiliar with early Spanish handwriting, face two hurdles—understanding the handwriting and vocabulary, and grasping the records’ institutional, historic, social, and cultural context. The new book, Mastering Spanish Handwriting and Documents: 1520-1820, by George R. Ryskamp, Peggy Ryskamp and H. Leandro Soria, addresses[…]Read more
Drew Smith’s new book for Beginning and Intermediate genealogists, Generation by Generation: A Modern Approach to the Basics of Genealogy have begun to come in and are uniform in their high praise. Below are three examples. Thomas MacEntee, writing on his blog, “Genealogy Bargains” on March 8, remarks that, “Over the past year or two,[…]Read more
Genealogical Research in Ohio. New 3rd Edition! – By Kip Sperry Ohio has an abundance of resources available for genealogical and historical research–statewide indexes and personal name finding aids, biographies, local histories, vital and church records, probate and court records, census and military records, land records, newspapers, naturalization records, gravestones, genealogical manuscript collections, and many[…]Read more
[Excerpted from Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, 3d ed. rev. (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2017), pp. 52–53, §2.22–2.23.] “Six basic rules govern our citation of titles, regardless of the type of record or publication we are using: 1) BOOK, CD, DVD, JOURNAL, MAP, WEBSITE, ETC. For published stand-alone[…]Read more
As we have noted on a number of occasions, Val D. Greenwood’s Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy discusses and explains in detail all the major sources for genealogy research in the U.S. The volume devotes two chapters to census records that explain the contents of and differences between the official U.S. censuses 1790-1940, colonial censuses,[…]Read more
The new Second Edition of The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States identifies 600 major historical figures in its 1,700+ pages. These celebrities range from W. H. Auden and Jane Austin to Thomas Mann and Karl Marx, and from John Kerry and Robert E. Lee to Aristotle[…]Read more
William J. Roulston’s incomparable Researching Scots-Irish Ancestors is a comprehensive, 600-page guide to the vast collection of sources that can help researchers trace their Scots-Irish forebears from the United States to their origins in Ireland. Here are three samples taken from different sections of the work illustrating just a few of the many sources therein.[…]Read more
As Dr. David Dobson explains in his new book, The Covenanters of Scotland, 1638-1690, the Wars of the Covenant occurred between 1639 and 1651, when Scotland and England were two independent countries, though both were subject to King Charles I. The cause of the Covenanter movement lay in the attempts of the Stuart kings to[…]Read more
Did you know that boundaries of the State of Arizona were not finalized until the Gadsden Purchase of 1853? Gold strikes played an important role in enticing Americans to settle in Alaska. Can you name the dates of the strike at Sitka, Sindham Bay, or the Yukon? Following the American Revolution, a number of the[…]Read more
(Excerpted from Michael J. Leclerc, “Crafting Family Histories,” Elizabeth Shown Mills, ed.,Professional Genealogy: Preparation, Practice & Standards (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2018), 519–44.) Writing family histories is one of the most meaningful ways we can communicate the results of our research to our family members and even ourselves. Our projects can be large or small.[…]Read more
The Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec or the United States. Second Edition, by Gary Boyd Roberts is remarkable in a number of ways. Obviously, it documents nearly 1,000 lines of North Americans who can claim royal ancestors—more than any other publication. The Introduction to this new three-volume edition is nearly[…]Read more
As we have noted previously Drew Smith, the author of our how-to book Generation by Generation, is a highly trained librarian as well as an accomplished genealogist. Readers of his book are destined to learn about the wealth of information that could lead them to hard-to-find ancestors by utilizing library and archival sources. To illustrate[…]Read more
