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.
If you’ve never taken the time to track down offline vital records about your ancestors you might be asking yourself two questions right now: “Vital Records? What are those?” and “Offline? Why would I need a quick guide to finding Vital Records offline when it’s so easy to surf for everything online?” But you’ll soon discover that adding these offline records to your research is an integral step in understanding your ancestors’ lives and building a quality family tree.
Searching for and locating records about our ancestors is seldom a simple process. Of course, we all have those easy to find individuals that seem to appear in every single record at just the right time — but many of us spend most of our time searching for those elusive members of our tree that appear to have avoided being recorded on purpose.
If you’ve hit a brick wall in your research, check our list of 13 common reasons why people fail to find the genealogy data they’re looking for. These are not the only reasons a person might hit a brick wall or miss information (some circumstances, like adoption, provide even greater challenges) but in the vast majority of cases one or more of these observations apply. If you feel that something on the list describes your research take the time to address it and you might find that you tear down your family history obstacle once and for all.
Many people are unaware of the fact that not all of Ancestry’s records show up in search. A surprising number of collections have not been indexed and are therefore virtually invisible to the everyday user of the site. These browse-only collections, as they are known, need to be purposely sought out if you want to take advantage of the records they contain. Some collections have been on Ancestry’s site for years and are still not searchable, while others are new collections that have not yet been indexed.
One of the most exciting things about doing family history research is moving beyond names and dates to begin exploring the stories of our ancestors’ lives. There are many ways to do this. Records like pension applications, wills and obituaries can provide details that allow us a special glimpse into the important events and personal relationships of our forebearers.
But there is one type of genealogy resource that often stands above the rest when it comes to providing unique insights. And this same resource also happens to be a wonderful place to locate names and dates, land ownership information, occupations and much more.
With billions of records now online, many of them free and open to all, is there really still an absolute need for offline research?
For our genealogical research to be considered thorough, does it have to be conducted offline, in an archive, courthouse, or library?
The short answer of course is “no” – depending on what we want to know.
But here’s the catch: we don’t know what we don’t know. In other words, if we haven’t visited a repository, how can we know what we’re missing? So, the long answer, tackled in this article, is a resounding “YES!” – offline research is a must. Maybe we won’t find the missing 90% of records proclaimed by the purists, but there’s no way the trip won’t be worth it.