Tag Archive
The Twin Hats of a Genealogist
Genealogists wear two hats. First hat is that of the rational, fact-finding researcher. This is the no-nonsense hat of the person who scours the information repositories, who photographs and scans, who copies, transcribes and indexes, who pins down significant dates and places, and who footnotes and documents every source. But there is another hat, that [...]
How Insider Genealogists Obtain Census Information Before It Is Released
Genealogy is a waiting game—at least as far as U. S. Census records are concerned. Take the 1940 Census, for instance. Everyone knows it won’t be available to the public until the second of April in 2012. That’s because census information is kept secret for 72 years after it is taken. To protect the privacy [...]
Are You Tweeting Your Descendants?
Nothing excites a family history researcher more than discovering letters from an ancestor. Why is that? Well, for one thing, letters usually contain names and dates, mention relatives and explain relationships, but they also offer a much deeper layer of information from the standpoint of genealogy. Letters convey the mood of your family member at [...]
What the Heck is an Ahnentafel?
The first time I came across the word, “ahnentafel,” I thought: “Man! I just wanted to find my ancestors, not learn some esoteric numbering system.” I tried to just ignore it, but it kept coming up. I kept reading that an ahnentafel is a concise way of expressing the information in a simple pedigree genealogy [...]
Six Ways to Substantiate Your Ancestor’s Death
Death is another milestone on their way. With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them Stephen Spender (1909-1995) Once you start to track an ancestor or an ancestress, you need information about the significant events in his or her life. This means the date and place he or she was born, married, [...]
Do You Really Know Your Own Name?
Let’s assume your ancestor’s last name is “Smith.” Not a bad assumption, since this is the most common American, British, and Australian surname, and comes in second in Canada and fifth in Ireland. The word originated from the Old English term for a metal worker, as in blacksmith or silversmith. With the popularity of the [...]
The Dilemma of the Ancestress
Ancestress is a good word. It indicates the female gender by itself, instead of adding the word, “female” to the word, “ancestor.” What’s so special about that? The patriarchal nature of our society’s history has subjected the legal and social status of women to the control of men. Take surnames, for instance. A female is [...]
Genealogical Skeletons in Your Closet
When you start tracing your ancestry, you are actually digging up the past. You expect to locate things like military records and the names of family members who lived long before you. One of the things that makes researching your family tree so much fun is the detective-work aspect of it all. But a good [...]
The Single Best Source of Information About an Ancestor
It’s the first place you should look when you begin researching your family history. Unless your relative is a celebrity, it’s probably the most convenient biographical summary you are likely to find about his or her life. It contains innumerable bits of information, along with names and locations of the person’s immediate relatives. What is [...]
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