By Janet Meydam FamilySearch is the largest and most popular free genealogy site on the internet. You can literally find billions of genealogical records here at no charge and, if you’ve been working on your family’s history for a while, you’ve likely used their site extensively. While most people find Read more…
One of the most common research mistakes that family historians make when building their tree (especially for the first time) is also one of the most limiting and potentially detrimental. We like to call it the Direct-Line Mistake, and its effect on your research outcomes is pretty huge. The direct-line mistake can be defined Read more…
If you’re a family historian you most certainly have a family tree. And, if you’re like most people, you have chosen to host this tree online, or in a downloadable program that syncs with an online tree. You may have chosen a collaborative tree provider, such as FamilySearch, a downloadable Read more…
If you’ve been studying your family’s history for a while, you’ve probably encountered some dates that have caused a little head scratching. It’s not uncommon at all to come across a date on a record that conflicts with our current research, for instance, or one that’s unreadable, incomplete or confusing. Read more…
Name searches are at the center of almost every single search we do for our ancestors. Whether we are using a giant site like Ancestry or a small local database, we want and expect to find our ancestors by the names they were known by. But, as any experienced genealogist Read more…
Summer is the season of travel and while we are wandering the world many of us are also planning a visit to a cemetery or two. If you’re going to try and find a burial site, no matter its age or location, you’ll want to take a few very important Read more…
By Janet Meydam As family history researchers we often get caught up exploring the people in our family tree and we forget to take into consideration the impact locations had on these people’s lives. But, often, location research can reveal as much or more about an ancestor as the vital Read more…
By Patricia Hartley When you are new to family history research, it’s easy to imagine that every ancestor will fit neatly into a perfect family group: father, mother and children. They’ll live together in one household in the census, share the same last name, and first births will occur at Read more…