Ever had an expert look at your tree? Professional genealogists often run family trees through a set of standard diagnostic tests and tweaks to improve them. We have created a list of the most important ones so you can apply them yourself. Use this list to examine your own genealogy research and see where you can make big improvements.
Interviewing older relatives is one of the best ways to gather family history details. We’ve put together a convenient list of 100 questions to bring along to your next gathering or share in email with those you love.
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.
If you are lucky enough to be from Scotland, or are of Scottish descent, then you will love the plethora of records just waiting to be researched here (tha thu fortanach, gu dearbh). Scotland, with its majestic green mountains veiled by waves of mist, is such a wondrous place to behold!
Hoping to figure out who is in an old family photo, what year it was taken or what the reason for the shot was? There is no doubt that discovering the who, when, where and why of family pictures is one of the most rewarding forms of genealogical sleuthing there is, but the job can seem nearly impossible. The good news is, there are some strategies that can help. If you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on some old images, following the steps below can help you finally decipher them.
Marriage Records are an essential part of family history research and are one of the best ways to find the ever-elusive maiden name of a woman – as well as parents’ names, ages and occupations, residence and religious beliefs. If you have not found such a record for every married couple in your tree, you are missing out.
Recently I have been searching diligently for my husband’s German ancestors and I’ve run into that age-old genealogy problem – how do I distinguish between two unrelated people who have the same name, similar ages and live near each other? Or two people from the same family with the same name?
Genealogy is an endless treasure hunt and, if you’re not careful, you can spend a lot of your own treasure building your family tree. Subscriptions to the popular paid genealogy sites like Ancestry and MyHeritage can cost hundreds of dollars a year. That’s why, when you discover your fourth-great-grandmother for free, it truly feels like you’ve stuck gold! And it’s why we are all about mining the vast genealogy resources on the internet for free records.
For the family history researcher, finding a stash of old family photographs can be a true genealogy jackpot! And while our first inclination might be to hang them right up on the wall for everyone to see – this may not be the best idea. Here’s how you should handle them.
Cousinship, or the relationship two cousins have to one another, is one of the most confusing concepts in genealogy and genetic genealogy. Today, we want to share with you some very simple tricks for calculating these relationships without the aid of a chart.