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.
From basic vital statistics to your ancestors’ occupations – have you gathered these 10 important facts for every individual in your family tree?
While most people find FamilySearch’s site pretty intuitive, there are a few buried elements that many overlook – ones that can have a huge impact on your research. It only takes a minute to try them out. Go see how they can help your research today!
Family History Daily recently reviewed the free family tree site RootsFinder, because its modern design and robust functionality makes it a great choice for anyone in the market for a new place to store their research. One of the features of RootsFinder that really stands out is its Web Clipper, an extension that works with your browser to extract genealogical records from other websites and copy them to your RootsFinder family tree. This extension is free and is one of the most useful tools you will find online for genealogical research.
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 affect on your research is pretty huge.
Several popular genealogy research sites have made it far too easy to find, skim and add another person’s family tree data to our own – citing only the tree as a source. But this practice can cause inaccurate trees and other major problems for researchers.
One of the most confounding date-related events ever in history, and one that regularly impacts genealogical researchers, is the calendar change of 1752. While we can all be incredibly glad that our ancestors had the foresight to correct calculation errors that would allow for more accurate calendars for generations to come – the change can certainly cause some confusion.
Name searches are at the center of almost every single search we do online 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 as. But, as any experienced genealogist will tell you, names seldom play by the rules.
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 things into consideration before you head out.
As you dive deeper into your family history you will likely run across terminology that you have not seen before or that you may not fully understand. Even those of us who have made history a profession will sometimes run across terms that are no longer used or that have a specific application that’s unfamiliar. This guide explores confusing military terms from the Civil War and the American Revolution to help you with your genealogy research.