Finding your ancestors in newspaper articles is in my opinion – an art, not a science. You must be clever and resourceful to get around the quality limitations in old newspapers A “feature” of older newspapers is the use of the hyphen. Hyphenated words were often used heavily to save space and due to the […]
Category: QuickSheets
Google Search has become so ubiquitous that “Google it” is a part of our everyday language. Searching using Google has a variety of options that many researchers are not familiar with. Here are 20 different ways to use Google to search; some are especially helpful when doing genealogy research. Download the Quicksheet PDF To obtain […]
I have always been mesmerized by my ancestors’ photographs. Just to see what they looked like and to compare their facial features with those of my close relatives has been a very interesting endeavor. But as I have been able to collect these old photos, I have also been quite interested in the surrounding “information.” […]
When researching our ancestors, one of the most important events, especially if they immigrated to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is their immigration and naturalization. The laws have changed multiple times and can be confusing if your ancestor is a woman or is non-white. The first Naturalization Act was passed in 1790. […]
The fact is that all old newspapers ever published in the United States are not online. Much less than you might think. So let’s just say for now that 15 to 30% of all U.S. newspaper pages have been digitized. Personally, I think that’s a very high number, but…… That leaves about 70-85% that are […]
Determining a “Cousin” Relationship between two people is quite easy if you have a proper chart. Many of the charts can be confusing. 1. Determine the common ancestor between two people. 2. For the first person, select the common ancestor’s relationship to them across the top row. 3. For the second person, select the common ancestor’s relationship to […]
In old newspapers, abbreviations were used to save space. Abbreviations were used to shorten many words – the most notable being given names as well as addresses. Remember that your search criteria are just a series of letters that are matched against a search index that was created from the scan and OCR process applied to the subject newspaper page. […]
One of the more interesting parts of our ancestors’ lives that we often discover only via their obituary, is their membership or attachment to a fraternal, ethnic, religious, or service organization or society. The Qlist below contains 25 of the more common ones in the United States. Why is this important? – 20% of men […]
When searching old newspapers and census records, we are often faced with unusual names of occupations, and we have no clue as to their meaning because the terms are not in use today. I have collected a list of about 280 old occupations and their meanings from a variety of sources. Dan Burrows and Jan […]
Obituaries are some of the most sought-after articles that are published in old newspapers. They can be found in a multitude of ways. If you are searching newspapers online, there are several methods to get you to the obituary faster and more effectively. There are thousands of indexes to newspaper obituaries that have been created […]