Probate records and wills are available online from all over the U.S. and are what I consider another hidden gem of information that can assist you in advancing your family history and genealogy research. What can you find in these records? How about the date of death, spouse’s and children’s names, birth order, siblings and […]
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.
Cyndi’s List is a massive and important resource for all genealogy researchers. It was started by Cyndi Ingle in 1996, and in my opinion, is one of the most useful resources that can guide you in your personal research. It is much more than a card catalog. There are various ways to reach resource links […]
If you are looking for death certificates, you need to know the timing of each state’s requirements. Each state in the U.S. started requiring death registrations in different years. Usually, some types of records were created prior to the official state laws, either at the county, city, or town levels. But state records weren’t required […]
In February 2017, I started publishing a list of the catalog of online historical newspapers from over 400 different collections put together by the Advantage Archives Company, developed in conjunction with the libraries, historical societies, and museums across the U.S. that preserve historical newspapers for their communities. The list has grown a lot since then. […]
Chronicling America is a nationwide database of online newspapers available for free for any researcher. The site was started in 2005 as a result of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Library of Congress. It went live in 2007. Every year […]
This section of the Archives databases is just a small fraction of what the Archives hold, it is an important subset that is very useful for genealogy researchers. From the Archives website: “You will find in the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) resource online access to records in a small selection of historic databases preserved […]
The Library of Congress (LOC) Digital Collections are large and growing. Currently there are 501 different collections. You should definitely incorporate this massive set of collections into your genealogy research. They are divided into 15 different topics (the number of collections is in brackets): American History [213] Art & Architecture [56] Geography & Places [32] Government, Law […]
FindaGrave is one of the most popular genealogy sites. It was started many years ago as a site to record where celebrities were buried and since its inception in 1995, it has grown into a massive site, recording photos of gravesites and including memorials to millions of deceased individuals. The history is best summarized from […]
Probate records and wills are available online from all over the U.S. and are what I consider another hidden gem of information that can assist you in advancing your family history and genealogy research. What can you find in these records? How about the date of death, spouse’s and children’s names, birth order, sibling’s and […]
Probate records and wills are available online from all over the U.S. and are what I consider another hidden gem of information that can assist you in advancing your family history and genealogy research. What can you find in these records? How about the date of death, spouse’s and children’s names, birth order, siblings and […]