Dollarhide’s Genealogy Rule #23: Locating the county where your ancestor lived is the first step in finding records about the time he was hauled into court for shooting his neighbor’s dog, threatening the census taker with a shotgun, or making illegal corn whiskey behind the barn. A 90-Percent Chance Since the first colonists came to[…]Read more
All censuses taken since 1790 are tabulated and organized by the counties within each state or territory. By federal precedence, the county is the basic unit of jurisdiction for census demographics. Alaska is the only state without counties; therefore, judicial districts are used as jurisdictions for the censuses taken there. In Louisiana, the term “parish”[…]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
Bill Dollarhide’s New York State Censuses & Substitutes belongs on the reference shelf of every individual and institution concerned about the Empire State. Why? Three reasons: (1) Census records and name lists for New York are found mostly at the county level, (2) New York State Censuses & Substitutes shows precisely which census records or[…]Read more
Discovering the maiden name of a female is often the biggest problem we have in genealogy. Whether you are researching your families in person, through the mail, or by Googling the Internet for sources, the basic search is still the same. As in all research tasks, we need to identify the possible places where such[…]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
