Genealogy research often has a domino effect. Locating one new piece of information can open new paths to explore and can knock down brick walls you have been pounding on for years. In this article I will discuss how a person’s date of death and/or last known location can help you reveal the cause when you don’t have a death certificate.
If you have been working on your family history for years and have never gone back over all of the documents you have accumulated, you are probably stalling your research progress. But, it’s never too late to blow off all the dust, open that squeaky file cabinet drawer and make sure you are getting all you can out of your records.
Here at Family History Daily we’ve covered DNA testing for genealogy research pretty extensively, but we’ve always focused on ancestry reports, not health reports. This is because we’ve always felt that the genetic “health” information provided today, which is still very much in its infancy, could be taken out of context and possibly cause distress and confusion to some users. In fact, some data offered by certain websites seems designed to mislead.
Most genealogists use federal census records on a regular basis. Few resources are, after all, as packed full of information and as easy to access as a census. And, while we all know that the details found in a census can often be incorrect, this helpful record collection has become a family history staple for good reason. No other resource recorded details about our ancestor’s lives in such a frequent and predictable way and, often times, the federal census may seem to be the only method we have to explore our ancestors’ lives between birth, marriage and death. However, a recent comment by a Family History Daily reader reminded us that there is another related resource group that many people researching US ancestors are either unaware of, or regularly underuse. And it’s a very valuable one.
Have you taken the time to find the gravesite of each of your ancestors? If you haven’t, you could could be missing a key part of your genealogy puzzle. Although we may spend years trying to find records that were created throughout our ancestors’ lives, it is sometimes the information about their deaths that can be the most revealing.
Ancestry.com is famous for its hints – those little green leaves in your family tree that give you fact suggestions from records and other family trees. These hints are such an important part of research on Ancestry that people become members just to take advantage of them.
Although this information may seem simple, it is not always obvious to beginners how this process works. Kimberly Tucker has taken the time to go over how to download your tree from the big three subscription sites – Ancestry, MyHeritage and FindMyPast – and has also provided links to some additional instructions for other programs.
If you’re one of the 175 million people around the world who use Pinterest every month, you probably already know that there’s a lot to love. Maybe you think of Pinterest as a great place to collect clever home decor ideas or as the best spot to peruse beautiful images of tasty food (who doesn’t?) – but did you know that Pinterest is so much more than that? It may be the free genealogy tool you’ve been missing.
While there are plenty of other good options that could be added to this list, I consider the following selection of books must-reads for any serious researcher, professional genealogist, or anyone who wants to become a professional genealogist (with one exception because all learning must be fun). In fact, they are a must for anyone who wants to improve their research. These books will certainly take you more than a year to work through, but the effort will be well worth it.
Millions of people received DNA tests over the holiday season and, as results start to finally roll in, many of you will be looking at ethnicity reports for the first time – 39% of this, 22% of that, 2% of something totally surprising…it can all be very exciting. But what does it all mean? Can you really take these percentages at face value? The answer is a resounding no. While your results certainly contain truths, accepting your ancestry report without additional interpretation will often lead you to confusion and inaccurate assumptions about your family’s history.