Uncover significant evidence of your family’s place in American history! Because membership requires exceptional documentation, hereditary societies’ lineage records are especially valuable. These 27 book volumes contain detailed lineages for members of such hereditary societies.
The twelve books on families in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan and Missouri. The books range from military and land to census schedules and family histories from a variety of states.
Keeping your genealogy research organized can be tricky, even challenging, especially once you’ve amassed a large amount of research on many different family lines. When you get copies of old documents or are given family heirlooms for safekeeping (which is often the case when you are the family genealogist) the issue of properly and safely storing these precious artifacts also comes up. The good news is that organizing and storing your genealogy research doesn’t have to be complicated at all. Here are some organizing and storage tips you can use that will ensure you can always find what you need when you need it or just want to look at it...
You don’t often hear about it, but Native Americans participated in the Civil War as both Union and Confederate soldiers. Why would Native Americans be invested in a domestic dispute within the United States? After all the battles between Native Americans and American settlers over the previous two centuries, it wouldn’t seem the two groups would have any common ground in the Civil War. But they did, and 28,693 Native Americans joined up as soldiers and fought alongside those whom they had previously fought against in other wars. Here’s the forgotten history of the involvement of Native Americans in the Civil War, including why they fought and what roles they played...
Finding your ancestors’ homestead, or at least where it used to be, is a really exciting part of genealogy. If you know where they lived, you can go visit the place in person and see things from their perspective. While the area may have changed (though in some cases it may have not changed at all, or very little), you can get an idea of what your ancestors may have seen every day and the landscape, climate, and natural flora and fauna that shaped their daily lives. You can quite literally walk in their footsteps. It is a wonderful way to get closer to your ancestors and to know them better.
The best way to find where your ancestors lived, the actual precise location of their home and/or land, is to look at a plat map. Most county courthouses have old plat maps going back decades, and sometimes even centuries in some places. If you know the state and county where your ancestor lived, you can often locate their residence on plat maps, if the courthouse has maps going back far enough in time. You just need to look through the court’s plat map books for the correct year or range of years that your ancestors lived in the county, then scrutinize the maps until you find their names...
Most genealogists have at least a few old family photos they can’t identify. It is very frustrating to know you have photos of your ancestors, but can’t place them in time or space, or even reveal their identities. You may have a photo of a direct ancestor that no one else has, and not even know it.
Fortunately, there are some sneaky photo identification techniques you can use to give you an excellent idea of where and when a photo was taken. These clues will give you a much better idea of who is in the photo, and may even give you the information you need to make a definite identification.
Here are the three photo identification techniques. Start using them today to tease the hidden information out of our photos and make them reveal their secrets...
Family reunions are fun times for reacquainting ourselves with relatives we haven’t seen in years, as well as for meeting relatives who are totally new to us. The bigger the reunion, the more likely there are to be people there who are distant cousins you’ve not only never met, but never heard mentioned. Yet there they are, connected to you by blood and ancestry. Even if everyone in the family is not as into genealogy as you are, you can still incorporate family history research and education into the reunion in a way that is fascinating to others (instead of boring), boosts your own research, and may even create some new genealogy enthusiasts in the process.
Here are 11 genealogy research tips to incorporate into your next family reunion...
AF-017: Genealogy Basics: Birth Record Research Advice for Beginners
Vital records… records of births, deaths, and marriages… are a basic part of genealogy research. They tell you the important details of your ancestors’ lives, such as names, dates, and places associated with them. The information found in vital records can often be stepping off points for further avenues of research, as well. As a genealogist, you should ideally be collecting as many vital records as possible on your ancestors and reading every line of them. You never know when a hidden but important piece of information will be on an unexpected place on a vital record.
Addressing the explosive growth in ancestral travel, this compelling narrative combines intriguing tales of discovery with tips on how to begin your own explorations. Actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy’s featured story recounts his recent quest to uncover his family’s Irish history, while twenty-five other prominent writers tell their own heartfelt stories of connection. Spanning the globe, these stories offer personal takes on journeying home, whether the authors are actively seeking long-lost relatives, meeting up with seldom-seen family members, or perhaps just visiting the old country to get a feel for their roots. Sidebars and a hefty resource section provide tips and recommendations on how to go about your own research, and a foreword by the Genographic Project’s Spencer Wells sets the scene. Stunning images, along with family heirlooms, old photos, recipes, and more, round out this unique take on the genealogical research craze…
One of the biggest challenges in genealogy is the pursuit of female ancestors. This is because the females were so often absorbed into their husband’s families (assuming they got married), taking on their husband’s surnames, and losing their original identities in historical documents. You will often find a mention of a female ancestor in a historical document, but more often than not, she is referred to using only her first name or her first and married name. Too often, the maiden name is seemingly lost. While in some cases, it really may be lost, this usually is not the case. If you do your research right, you can uncover the maiden names and make the correct connections to your female ancestors’ families of origin. In doing so, you discover entire new branches of your family and learn more about your own origins.
Here are some techniques you can use to find those elusive female ancestors...
Do you have New Jersey ancestry and are looking for sources to start researching your family tree in the Garden State? There are a lot of resources you can use, both free and paid, to find those New Jersey ancestors. Because it is one of the original 13 colonies, records for the state go back for centuries. There is plenty to find. Here are some online and offline sources for New Jersey genealogical records to get you started on your family history journey...
Genetoons is a simple, one-panel, Genealogy cartoon for the whole family to enjoy. Using a Genealogical idea or fact, I want the reader to laugh! I hope you enjoy them.
President Andrew Johnson has two important distinctions in American history. One is that he was Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president and became the nation’s 17th president after Lincoln’s assassination. The second is that he was the first president to be impeached (and only the second overall, with Bill Clinton being the other one). Impeachment is a formal hearing in the House of Representatives that is done to decide if formal charges of wrongdoing are warranted. If the impeachment is successful, a full trial will be held by the Senate to determine if the president or other high-level government official will be removed from office.
In both Johnson’s and Clinton’s cases, the House of Representatives voted to send them to the Senate for trial to be removed from office. In both cases, the Senate acquitted them, and they were allowed to remain in their presidential positions...
AF-015: Lineage Societies: How to Join Them (and Why You Should)
When people get involved in genealogy, a lot of them will eventually become interested in lineage societies. What are lineage societies? They are clubs, groups, and organizations that you are allowed to join (or not) based on your ancestry. For example, Daughters of the American Revolution (one of the better known lineage societies) accepts applications for membership from women who can prove they are descended from someone who fought or provided assistance to the colonial cause in the American Revolution....
Break through brick walls in your genealogical research
Learn how to use innovative methods to unearth hard-to-find ancestors. Advanced Genealogy Research Techniques shows you, step by step, how to uncover elusive details by taking advantage of specialized tools and software programs and using proven best practices for breaking through the brick walls that have hindered your progress...
Thoroughly revised to cover new tools, techniques, and data, How to Do Everything: Genealogy, Fourth Edition uniquely addresses all the major genealogical record types and explains traditional and digital research strategies. Genealogy expert George G. Morgan shows you how to research your family history using the most current websites, mobile apps, social networking sites, record archives, census data, digital records, DNA research, and more. Discover your family’s past with help from the new edition of this bestselling guide...
Even the federal government recognized the importance of oral histories long ago. Back in the 1930’s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps was established to create jobs during the Great Depression and shore up the nation’s infrastructure at the same time, taking oral histories was one of the many jobs performed by people in the Corps.
There were still people alive in the United States then who had personally fought in or lived through the Civil War, and also people who had been born as slaves and spent the early parts of their lives being owned by other people. The U.S. government recognized the importance of getting the stories of these people recorded while they were still here to tell about those long ago times. They were, after all, an important part of American history. Getting the personal perspective on those times was as important as knowing the book facts about them...
Oral histories are a crucial part of your genealogy research. Whether you are conducting them or reading them, you will get invaluable information from them that you almost certainly won’t find anywhere else. The details from oral histories can help guide you to new avenues of research, fill in personal details and information gaps in your family tree, and bring long forgotten events and people back to virtual life again (and preserve them for future generations).
Most conventional genealogical research advice recommends that you start your family history journey with yourself, then work backward in time through all the people you know personally or know about with certainty. Along the way, one of the first steps you should take as you begin connecting one generation to another is to interview the oldest members of your family. They have information and memories that no one else does, and can bring your family history to life in amazing and unexpected ways. You may even solve some long-standing family mysteries just by talking to your older relatives. Maybe they never talked about these mysteries before because no one asked them. You can be the first, and get your genealogy research off to a powerful start...
