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 […]
Category: Miscellaneous
(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 […]
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 […]
When researching our ancestors, one of the most important events is their marriage(s). Determining their spouse and the date and location of marriage is important as we document the major events in their lives. Most folks limit their search to the obvious repositories, whether online or not, focusing primarily on marriage certificates and licenses. There […]
Normally when people think of Google, they think of the search engine. As genealogy researchers, it is imperative that we learn to use the Google search engine effectively since it can help us find ancestors, relevant documents, and many more pertinent things to help find our ancestors. Listed below are a number of highly effective […]
Genealogy research is hard; nobody cooperates; the database you want to research is the next county over; you have names that have thousands of duplicates; the online family trees are all over the place, etc. So you continue to not find your ancestors. In the interests of keeping this losing streak alive, here are 6 […]
The National Archives recently announced the third in a series of online finding aid tools: the Donated Collection Explorer. Rather than me trying to explain it, please go to the link above. As of September 2023, there are 845,435 scans from Donated Collections online representing 3.1% of the estimated total number of 27,266,434 estimated total textual pages. Yes, they have a ways […]
Whether you search online, or offline at libraries, courthouses, or archives, many times our ancestors can be elusive. Sometimes they just cannot be found. Whether it be a birth date, census entry, or death date – or anything else of interest to us – we just can’t seem to “score.” There are lots of reasons […]
Here is the Greatest Hits Album for The Ancestor Hunt for this previous quarter of 2023. There are two sides (A Side and B Side), each with 8 Tracks (posts), along with 8 Bonus Tracks (pages). These are the most popular of the hundreds of posts published by The Ancestor Hunt over these last 3 […]
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. And for our ancestors, too! There is a significant amount of genealogy information that can be […]