Editor’s Note: Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck’s groundbreaking book, Revolutionary War Pensions Awarded by State Governments 1775-1874, the General and Federal Governments Prior to 1814, and by Private Acts of Congress to 1905, identifies and recreates the Revolutionary War pension files generated prior to the disastrous fire in the War Department on 8 November 1800, and a[…]Read more
In Chapter 21 of The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. Fourth Edition, author Val Greenwood cautions genealogists that during ‘pick and shovel research’–when the documents we need are not online and we must go to them in person—we will be glad we know how to abstract those records. At the outset of the chapter, the[…]Read more
The system of primogeniture, the medieval practice of passing down a title and its holdings to one’s eldest son (or daughter), accounts for the fact that many Americans have royal or noble ancestors. For example, the millions of descendants of the 970 immigrant ancestors discussed in the 2018 edition of Gary Boyd Roberts’ book, The[…]Read more
Virtually no other class of records, religious or secular, has been kept as meticulously as the monthly meeting records of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The oldest such records span three centuries of American history and testify to a general movement of population that extended from New England and the Middle Atlantic states southward[…]Read more
You’ve probably run across the word “Ahnentafel” over the course of your research, but have you ever had it explained? The word’s origin is German for “ancestor table.” These days, however, it refers to a particular kind of numbering system used to keep track of our ancestors. Best used with pedigrees, as opposed to the[…]Read more
Chapter Five of The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. 4th Edition, by Val Greenwood, is entitled “Libraries and the National Archives (NARA).” In a way the chapter title is understated because many libraries have digitized their family history holdings (e.g., personal papers, published family histories, military records, etc.) and made them available for free on[…]Read more
The American Society of Genealogists bestows its annual Jacobus Award upon the finest work of genealogical scholarship of the preceding year. It would be hard to find a more deserving winner of its coveted Jacobus Award than the 1988 selection, Pioneers of Old Monocacy: The Early Settlement of Frederick County, Maryland 1721-1743, by Grace L.[…]Read more
In recent issues of “Genealogy Pointers,” we have highlighted Angus Baxter’s In Search of Your German Roots. Fifth Edition. Besides Baxter’s description of German history’s impact on its genealogy sources, equally informative chapters in the Fifth Edition cover German genealogy websites, German-Jewish records, the German records of the LDS Church, the archives of Germanic genealogy,[…]Read more
Genealogical.com is delighted to announce its publication of the preeminent textbook for Scots-Irish genealogy. This 2018 second edition is a massively expanded version of its 2005 predecessor. The new edition includes additional information on church records and landed estate papers, as well as new chapters looking at records relating to law and order, emigration, business[…]Read more
Engaging in genealogical research requires a commitment of time, energy, and resources. Along the way, we may invest in travel, subscribe to web sites, buy books, establish relationships and more, as we devote ourselves to unraveling the mysteries and connections of our families. One aspect of genealogy that many hobbyists do not make a serious[…]Read more
In the Fourth Edition of The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy, author Val D. Greenwood devotes three full chapters (80 pages) to the subject of land records. One chapter covers national (colonial and U.S.) land, a second one covers local land, and the third explains the formats of land record abstracts. Land records, of course,[…]Read more
[The second part of this article is condensed from the chapter by the same name in the 5th Edition of Mr. Baxter’s classic how-to book, In Search of Your German Roots. Readers should note that, in the interest of brevity, a number of tables in the book which describe the migration and distribution of the[…]Read more
