Hello to The Ancestor Hunt readers! I have decided to start publishing a Bi-monthly Newsletter. It will be anywhere from 5 to 8 pages, published on the 15th of the month, and the last day of the month. It will include links to all of the articles published since the previous newsletter, as well as […]
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.
Just the other day, I was having a short conversation with François Desjardins, of the Drouin Institute, the company behind Généalogie Québec, which offers over 45 million online files and images for the Quebec and French-Canadian research community. My interest was particularly the free online obituaries, which now number over 2.3 million names across Canada. […]
When researching our ancestors, one of the most important events is obviously their birth (otherwise they wouldn’t be ancestors – but I digress). Determining the date and location of birth is important as we document the major events in their lives. Most folks limit their search to the obvious repositories, whether online or not. But there […]
When researching our ancestors, one of the most important events is obviously their death. Determining the date and location of death is important as we document the major events in their lives. Most folks limit their search to the obvious repositories, whether online or not. That would include online or offline death indexes (such as […]
When researching our ancestors, one of the most important events is their marriage – in some cases, there are none, or just one, and I have some who had six. Determining the date and location of marriage is important as we document major events in their lives. Most of these should not stand alone as […]
Most folks know that finding obituaries is a bonanza when it comes to finding information about the deceased as well as his/her family. For example, if you are looking for the maiden name of a female sibling of a deceased married woman, if the obituary states that the deceased had a brother named “John Moran” […]
The “Search Multiple Historic Newspaper Collections All At Once” website, elephind.com has just published an update that includes many more items and issues from 2 updated collections: (from the August, 2020 Elephind Newsletter): Updated Newspaper Collections Hoosier State Chronicles – operated by the Indiana State Library, this is collection of Indiana’s historic newspapers contains over 1 million pages. […]
Ah the memories. School yearbooks, immortalize how we looked and what we did in high school or college. Whether we looked goofy or cool, that photo is there forever. And they document what clubs, sports, or other activities we were involved in. Primarily a North American phenomenon historically, the first yearbook published was the Yale Banner […]
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has just announced the 2020 awards for funding for additions to Chronicling America: Maine State Library, Augusta, ME Award: $210,270 Digitization of 100,000 pages of Maine newspapers, dating from 1785 to 1963, as part of the state’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program. Rutgers, the State University of […]
Do you research naturalization records? No? Why not? Does the thought of going through paper files in dusty court basements turn you off? Well – I’m here to tell you that it is worth it – and with recent digitization efforts – more and more original documents have been scanned and been made available via […]