(Excerpted from Unpuzzling Your Past. Fourth Edition, Updated, by Emily Anne Croom, pp. 37-39.) Naming practices vary from place to place and generation to generation. However, certain consistencies have existed for nearly four centuries in the area we now call the United States. Children were, and still are, often named for parents, grandparents, and other[…]Read more
Do you know where the term “wiki comes from, or how the concept has become so pervasive on the internet? More important, can you name the most important wikis for genealogy? The following article, which is excerpted from Chapter Nine of the Fourth Edition of The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, by Val Greenwood, answers[…]Read more
Using DNA to find your family heritage has become an everyday topic of conversation. If you haven’t personally sent a saliva sample in the mail, you know someone who has. And you can barely miss a day without seeing a commercial from Ancestry or My Heritage advertising one of its DNA products. Just a few[…]Read more
I have often viewed royal lineage research with more than a little skepticism. As a newly-elected genealogical society president, I can remember inviting visitors to a society monthly meeting to introduce themselves and tell a bit about the focus of their research. A man stood up, identified himself, and told us that he had researched[…]Read more
(This article was originally prepared for the New England Historic Genealogical Society website, American Ancestors, and is reproduced here with the permission of the author.) Of about one-third New England, one-third mid-Atlantic, and one-third Southern ancestry, George Herbert Walker Bush was the first U.S. president probably related to over half of the American people—at least[…]Read more
This article originally appeared on our prior website/blog in March 2010. It is reprinted here with minor alterations. In January of 2010, Ancestry.com announced to its subscribers the introduction of the “1950 Census Substitute” and urged us to “discover your parents, grandparents – – maybe even yourself.” Taken at face value, this announcement was pretty[…]Read more
If you are beginning to accumulate a fair amount of paper in the early stages of your research, it’s probably time to take stock of what you have and how you plan to organize it–even before you enter the information into a computer database–lest you start drowning in an ocean of paper. Our popular author,[…]Read more
City directories may be one of the most underused genealogical sources available. Old city directories exist for virtually every community in America, often going back to the establishment of a community. Many of the privately published city directories date back over a hundred years, and some of these collections are complete for every year in[…]Read more
With the transcription and publication of The Albemarle Parish Vestry Book, 1742-1786 [Virginia] the last of the colonial Virginia vestry books is accessible to researchers. Complete with an every-name index for ease in finding persons, this publication represents a boon to researchers searching for ancestors in Surry and Sussex counties, Virginia, as well as neighboring[…]Read more
For this issue of “Genealogy Pointers” we are once again highlighting sage advice for genealogists from America’s most respected author/teacher Val Greenwood. Below, we have included excerpts of Mr. Greenwood’s recommendations—indicating chapters and page numbers from the 4th edition of The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy–pertaining to immigration and passenger records, Revolutionary War and other[…]Read more
