The best kind of oral interview is the one where the subject of your interview knows exactly what to expect. Your interviewee has been preplanning for the interview and knows what to expect from you and may have some documents with them that will help them to refresh their memory. Suggestions and discussion prior to the meeting will help to bring ...

In the Midwest, particularly Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and areas such as those, many of the immigrants were of Norwegian descent, which presents it’s own special problems when trying to trace your roots. Most people know well about the explorations of the Vikings along the coasts of North America, which began long before the English expediti...

While in the pursuit of your family’s history,  if you are fortunate enough to have someone who has the packrat tendencies, chances are that you’re going to come into contact with some old documents, birth, marriage or death certificates, in some cases old family Bibles or some of those amazing old photographs. Keeping them viable par...

In Genealogy, there are many areas that need to be looked at. In point of fact, almost too many mysteries to tackle at one time, if you are searching, as most of us are, for more than one family ancestor. One of the things that many of us neglect to do is to focus on each area of our genealogy research, one at a time, until we find the solution we...

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...

When searching for your ancestors, you can only go back a few generations until you run into the immigration question. All of our ancestors, unless we are Native American, came from across the ocean, whether across the Atlantic or around the Cape of Good Hope and up to the Pacific coast. Many people came in through Ellis Island, during the years o...

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...

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...