You don’t have to have murderers or famous outlaws in your family tree to make use of criminal records in your research. If you have ancestors who lived in England in the last three and a half centuries you do not want to miss the vast (and free) collections of The Old Bailey Online and its sister site the Digital Panopticon.
Collaborating with others is one of the most cherished aspects of genealogy. While it’s entirely possible to make great progress conducting your family history research completely on your own, working and sharing with like-minded folks can be both helpful and a whole lot of fun.
Surnames are a critical piece of our genealogical research, and learning where a surname originated — geographically and etymologically — can not only enhance our research but add another chapter to our family history stories.
MyTreeTags™ is just that, a set of tags, or labels, which you can assign to the profile of any or every individual in your Ancestry tree. These tags will be super helpful not only to you as the tree owner, but also to anyone viewing your tree online.
Despite how valuable census records have become to family history researchers, they were not created for this purpose. For this reason we need to understand everything we can about this go-to resource if we are to walk away with the most accurate data available. Here are 9 census facts that may surprise you.
ThruLines, one of Ancestry’s newly announced features, is yet another advancement in their quest to connect DNA testing and traditional genealogy research more seamlessly. Here’s how to put it to use in your family tree today.
Women were just as important to a household and community hundreds of years ago as they are today but, thanks to laws and social ideas that limited women’s roles and rights, their contributions and names are often lost to history. To uncover your female ancestors’ lives, you’re going to have to work harder, dig deeper and be more creative.
Some folks yearn for the “good old days,” when times were simpler. But just because your ancestors lacked the hectic, technology-driven lifestyles we lead today doesn’t mean they had it easy. Luckily, some of the more complicated, strenuous, and dangerous tasks they endured are now obsolete.
DNA testing for ancestry is more popular than ever. More than 12 million Americans alone have now been tested. And with this many DNA results online in the various databases, chances are very, very good that you’re going to find hundreds of distant cousins when your results are processed.
As search engines go, Google is the undisputed king. But, while there’s much to be said about the benefits of turning to Google for genealogical research, family historians can also get great results from trying other search engines, like Bing. Here’s how to make the most of your efforts.