Let’s say you are looking for the German origin of one of your ancestors, and you’ve exhausted your English-language sources. You are familiar with German genealogical words and phrases because you own a copy of Ernest Thode’s German-English Genealogical Dictionary. You’re reasonably confident that the missing ancestor came to the U.S. from Berlin, so what[…]Read more
To celebrate the release of the new fourth edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, EE’s author offers guidance drawn from the new edition. This is the third in our four-part series. ( View Part 1 | View Part 2 ) Previous posts in this series introduced the concept of layered[…]Read more
To celebrate the release of the new fourth edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, author Elizabeth Shown Mills offers guidance drawn from the new edition. This is the first in our four-part series. Basic Rule 1: We Cite What We Use This bit of wisdom is one most of us[…]Read more
The following one-page history of the Carlin clan associated with County Donegal and County Derry is indicative of what the reader can expect to encounter with each of the 300+ histories of surnames compiled by Brian Mitchell in his book, The Surnames of North West Ireland: Concise Histories of the Major Surnames of Gaelic and[…]Read more
Consider the following 17th-century Virginia land patent abstract: “MATHEW PRICE, son and heire to JOHN PRICE, late of Va., labourer, 150 acs. Henrico Co., upon Turkey Island Cr., 23 May 1638, p. 558. E. by S. upon sd. Cr., W. by N. toward Bremo, S. by W. upon land granted to his late father, now[…]Read more
To celebrate the release of the new fourth edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, author Elizabeth Shown Mills offers guidance drawn from the new edition. This is second in our four-part series. (View part 1) Technology has complicated the process of citing our sources. With digital images delivered online or through other[…]Read more
(View 4th Edition of Evidence Explained in Store) The Information Age has created a Catch-22 for historians. Online, we can scour billions of documents from around the world. Images of priceless originals are instantly downloadable to our PCs, laptops, tablets, and phones. Travel to archives, for long slogs through dusty boxes of record bundles tied[…]Read more
Following is a discussion of some of the things I have learned from studying the migration of people from Scotland and Ireland into the Maritimes. Books about emigration usually talk of the forces that drove people out of their homelands – what we call the push factors: Highland clearances, breakdown of the traditional clan system,[…]Read more
To celebrate the release of the new fourth edition of Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, EE’s author offers guidance drawn from the new edition. This is the fourth in our four-part series. ( View Part 1 | View Part 2 | View Part 3 ) Citations are flexible structures. They are not rigid formulas from which we dare[…]Read more
If you were looking for a royal (or noble) ancestor in the First Edition of Gary Boyd Roberts’ signature work, the two-volume Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States, but came up empty, don’t despair. In compiling the new Second Edition of RD 900, Mr. Roberts has identified[…]Read more
Gary Boyd Roberts, author of the Second Edition of Royal Descents of 900 Immigrants to the American Colonies, or the United States (RD900) is also an expert on the genealogies of America’s presidents. He has published those findings in two editions of a book entitled Ancestors of American Presidents. Some of our presidents, of course,[…]Read more
Chapter Twelve of Mastering Spanish Handwriting and Documents, 1520-1820 tackles the difficult task of transcribing the 16th-century Cortesana style of Spanish handwriting commonly found in documents created by notaries and other officials of the Spanish Empire. With a nod to Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, authors George Ryskamp, Peggy Ryskamp, and Leandro Soria introduce the notorious[…]Read more
