A person who starts researching their family history very quickly runs into the question – ”What Happened to the 1890 Census? The Census Bureau explains it best in this link: U.S. Census Bureau History: 1890 Census Fire, January 10, 1921 In summary, a fire at the U.S. Commerce building in Washington DC destroyed a substantial […]
Author: Kenneth R Marks
Kenneth R Marks was born and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, receiving a BS in Mathematics in 1968. His career was in Information Technology; with the last 20 Years as a software executive with Boeing, Pearson, and NASA. His genealogy career began in 2004. He is an expert in newspaper research for genealogy, as well as additional genealogy topics. He regularly conducts webinars on the subject and has authored three genealogy books. See the About page for more details.
The Ancestor Hunt, founded in 2008, is focused on helping genealogy and family history researchers of all skill levels to achieve their goals, by providing links to free online genealogy collections, and search tips and techniques, largely via easy-to-understand Quick Reference Guides.
One of the main goals for genealogists is finding marriage information about their ancestors. Over the past few decades, thanks to volunteers, librarians, and archivists, a great number of indexes to marriage collections have been provided for free online. These searchable indexes provide specific marriage license, bond, and certificate information, and sometimes scanned images of […]
Mortuary and Funeral Home records are yet another little-used resource by genealogy researchers. They are difficult to obtain, especially in hard copies from the original funeral home. You can contact them, but often, mortuaries went out of business or were sold to another company. And many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. […]
Another type of genealogy record that provides tremendous value is criminal records. Some of our ancestors unfortunately got in trouble with the law. And records were kept from arrests through court cases to prison documents. Now, more and more of these records are being digitized or transcribed and are being made available online. Types of […]
Another type of genealogy record that provides tremendous value is criminal records. Some of our ancestors, unfortunately, got in trouble with the law. And records were kept from arrests through court cases to prison documents. Now, more and more of these records are being digitized or transcribed and are being made available online. Types of […]
(Updated October 2023) The Library of Congress’s Digital Collections are large and growing. Currently, there are 1,039 different collections. They are divided into 15 different topics (the number of collections is in brackets): For genealogy research, three topics are quite useful, although many of them might have pertinent information that can assist us. On the […]
Another type of genealogy record that provides tremendous value is criminal records. Some of our ancestors unfortunately got in trouble with the law. And records were kept from arrests through court cases to prison documents. Now, more and more of these records are being digitized or transcribed and are being made available online. Types of […]
One of the main goals for genealogists is finding marriage information about their ancestors. Over the past few decades, thanks to volunteers, librarians, and archivists, a great number of indexes to marriage collections have been provided for free online. These searchable indexes provide specific marriage license, bond, and certificate information, and sometimes scanned images of […]
Another type of genealogy record that provides tremendous value is criminal records. Some of our ancestors unfortunately got in trouble with the law. And records were kept from arrests through court cases to prison documents. Now, more and more of these records are being digitized or transcribed and are being made available online. Types of […]
The Internet Archive is a remarkable resource for performing online genealogy research. There are hundreds of thousands of online genealogy resources such as BMD records, newspapers, yearbooks, town records, and much much more. Another set of resources that are available and are numerous are eBooks. They can be read online; some are downloadable; some you […]