November 1, 2024 Genealogists want to make their family trees as accurate as possible. We spend hours searching through old documents in repositories and online, looking for the records that give us the answers to our questions. Experts tell us to find more than one source for every birth, death or marriage date that …
Using Land Records for Genealogical Research
October 25, 2024 Land records are often underutilized by genealogists. We tend to think of them as dry legal documents that don’t contain much useful genealogical information. I used to feel that way myself, but some major brick wall breakthroughs based on land records have changed my mind. Land was a major reason that …
Civil Registration Substitutes
October 18, 2024 As I discussed last week, governmental vital records such as birth, marriage and death are important to building a family tree. Unfortunately, they’re often unavailable. In the United States these records have only been kept for the last century or so. Fortunately, for earlier ancestors, there are other records that can substitute …