I recently posted on Facebook that I am working on my family addresses in preparation for the 1940 census opening next week. A couple people sent me private messages asking how I was doing that. So, here are some tips. Did your family live in a city or town that published annual city directories? Don’t […]
Chippewa County, Minnesota has announced that it will again pay bounties for coyotes due to the damage they are doing to farm animals. According to TwinCities.com “The Board of Commissioners voted Tuesday to pay $10 for every coyote trapped or shot in the county and brought to the sheriff’s office from Dec. 1 through April […]
I was looking at some old document copies today. I can’t decipher all of the words as I carefully transcribe it into a nice typed document. I need to use some of my proven methods for figuring out what it says: Put it way for a while Try to read it away from your home […]
I love to sit at my computer checking Ancestry.com, Facebook, NewspaperArchives, American Ancestors and a bunch of other websites. Today I was thinking about some other research ventures that involved on-site researching. I find it exhilarating to touch original records, get my fingers dirty paging through an old volume of court records, view an original […]
Some of my favorite records are those labeled as “miscellaneous” or “loose.” Others are data in the back of a totally unrelated record book or on the back of a note or index card. MiscellaneousThese may be a collection of related or unrelated papers and the dates of […]
Yesterday when I was at the Minnesota Historical Society I noticed something that made me smile. I saw more than a dozen people sitting at tables researching in original records. Most of them stayed at it for many hours, going through file folders of records or multiple volumes of records. Others arrived later in the […]
100 years from now a family genealogist is looking at a family group sheet posted on whatever the technology of the day is. The first thing the budding genealogist notices is that somehow in the one ancestral family branch the father, mother, and child have all been given the same day of birth, November 24th. […]
In the summer of 2009 I was fortunate to be in two more states, Maine and New Hampshire. I have now visited all of the mainland 48 states. I have not been to Hawaii or Alaska and I hope to do so! I thought about this recently as one of my nephews asked me about […]
Today was spent at a client’s home. We were doing some organizing and research planning. This made me think of a column I wrote for Ancestry’s old electronic newsletter a few years ago. I reread and updated it and present it here as some food for thought. The following words are based on the premise […]
On October 24th, the La Crosse Public Library’s Archives “will receive the 2010 Governor’s Award for Archival Achievement. It recognizes not only the library’s extensive archives but the ways they’ve been made accessible, [Wisconsin] state archivist Peter Gottlieb said. “A lot of archives are content to wait for people to find them,” Gottlieb said. “What […]