One of the better places to seek your family roots is in the records of property.Since the concept of owning land began thousands of years ago, property purchases and gifts have been taking place and all of them leave a trail of paper that makes our lives as genealogists a great deal easier. Deeds, wills, transfers, mortgages and land grants are a...

Not all of the search for genealogical materials is going to be straight forward and easily found. Some cultures did not keep good records, for various reasons, while others did not have the wherewithal to do so. Among those which you may find difficult to research will be Native Americans, Black Americans and aboriginal peoples from countries s...

The internet is one of the latest and greatest new tools in our genealogical research and can be used to offer us: ~People and places to learn from. ~Meeting of the minds, people to assist us and places to discuss our research. ~A place to publish your conclusions, in many cases free of charge. A few of the things it won’t give you however a...

There are many places that you can use to learn the skills involved in genealogy, not the least of which is of course the internet. The advent of online classes in many areas has also reared its head in the genealogy courses, many of which are available for you to take online as opposed to taking the class in an institution of learning. Its fa...

Before you panic about the idea of charting your family tree, take a quick trip around the internet. There are a lot of genealogy sites that offer free “starters” from which you can fashion your own documentation, including a Google genealogy chart.. I strongly advocate this approach if you’re a beginner to family tree research. It helps a l...

The Latter Day Saints, also known as Mormons, are a group that has tenaciously collected genealogy records in two forms, a library and an online research engine, the first of which has celebrated over 100 years of community service. The Family History Library was founded in 1894 in Utah to gather and preserve valuable family information in one cen...

There are many, if not most Americans here today, whose family members were immigrants at one point and were naturalized citizens, so tracing the roots of the family isn’t always as straightforward as we might wish it could be. Finding the date of naturalization isn’t all that difficult if you know where, and how to accomplish it. Find...

While it’s common for genealogists to review birth, death, and marriage records (to name just a few). One area that the “home” researcher might forget is reviewing school and alumni records. These have a lot of valuable information, if only from the vantage point of family stories. For example, you may discover that the odd looking antique ...

One way to expand your knowledge of your ancestors is to use occupational records. By so doing you can often distinguish between people with very similar or same names and discern to which you’re related. You can also discover family traditions that were passed down from generation to generation through occupational “secrets” or techniques. ...

For a very long time among many different cultures, in particular the oral history was the only way of remembering one’s lineage and the important events of a group of people.  Even now, there are parts of each person’s history that no one but he or she knows. Unless someone asks and then considers it a duty of theirs and records the informat...