Sometimes the fastest way to find your ancestor is to stop looking at your ancestor. When researchers hit a brick wall, the natural reaction is to search harder for the same person. Unfortunately, that approach often overlooks the people who shared your ancestor’s life. Ancestors lived as part of families, neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and communities. […]
Category: Uncategorized
From Elephind: Elephind currently searches 47,119,848 pages from the 4,444 newspaper titles listed below. We still have over 150 million pages and thousands of titles to add — and this number continues to grow. Here is a list of all the titles for searching at Elephind: Start exploring at Elephind.com
The first record you find is often the beginning of the story—not the end of it. Finding an important record is exciting. A census, birth record, marriage license, or obituary can feel like the answer you’ve been searching for. But one record rarely tells the entire story. Every record was created for a specific purpose, […]
When you do not record where you searched, yesterday’s dead end can become tomorrow’s wasted hour. Genealogy research often involves searching many websites, databases, repositories, record collections, name spellings, locations, and date ranges. Without a record of those searches, it becomes surprisingly easy to repeat the same work. A search that produced no useful result […]
A missing record does not mean a missing ancestor—it usually means you haven’t found the right place to look yet. One of the quickest ways to stall a genealogy project is to assume that if a record cannot be found, it never existed. Historical records disappear for many reasons. Courthouses burned. Counties changed. Records were […]
The record that proves your theory wrong may be the one that leads you to the right ancestor. Every genealogist develops theories while researching. The problem begins when we accept only the records that support those theories and quietly ignore those that do not. Conflicting records are not inconveniences—they are opportunities to discover a more […]
Two people with the same name can quietly become one—and send your research down the wrong family line. Few genealogy mistakes are more common—or more costly—than assuming that two people with the same name must be the same individual. Shared names appear in every place and every time period, especially among common surnames and families […]
One incorrect family tree can send you and hundreds of other researchers down the wrong path. Online family trees are among the most valuable genealogy resources available—but they are also one of the easiest places to inherit someone else’s mistakes. A tree should be treated as a research clue, not as evidence. Thousands of researchers […]
Most genealogists know how to search newspapers. Far fewer know how to truly research them. That difference matters. Because newspapers are unlike any other genealogical record source. They are messy, inconsistent, emotional, fragmented, and often difficult to search effectively. Names are misspelled. Articles are hidden in unexpected sections. OCR errors distort people and places. Important […]
A week or so ago, I was introduced to a new website and capability called memo. It is a simple function – adding audio to the photos in your photo library. I contacted the creator, Maxine Gill, and asked her to write a few paragraphs about the site: Preserving Family History in Your Own Voice: […]