Many War of 1812 veterans, their widows, or their heirs received military bounty land warrants through Congressional Acts of the 1850s. Those land warrants were used to acquire land in the federal domain. The warrants were surrendered in order to obtain a patent that actual transferred title in real property from the federal government to […]

Searches are always conducted more effectively when the user knows how all search parameters and options work. That knowledge allows searches to be conducted in ways that best fit the varying spellings and rendering of the name. The search interface at FamilySearch allows user to check an exact box to search for the spelling exactly […]

Just because two individuals have the same last name does not mean that they are related. Researchers working on a Smith family know that two people with this common last name are not related, but what about a more unusual surname? Well it depends on the origination of the name (and that even is not […]

City directories can tell researchers several things, usually related to name, residence, occupation and proximity of neighbors. Urban researchers are usually well-served by researching all extant directories for their people of interest. In some unusual circumstances directories can tell researchers even more. Noticing these items requires the researcher to search for the people of interest […]

I’m not yet prepared to say what her maiden name was. I may never know her maiden name. However, her maiden name was not Phillips. Susannah Rucker, wife of John Rucker who died in the early 1740s in Orange County, Virginia, did not have the maiden name of Phillips. Period.The source of this statement is […]

This was posted to the group page I have for Genealogy Tip of the Day on Facebook and it generated some discussion about how the first name could be reasonably interpreted. Our discussion was somewhat hypothetical as other handwriting on the page was not viewed. This was done intentionally as many indexes are created in just […]

I’ve been working in digital newspaper collections lately and this newspaper clipping, from the Mendon [Illinois] Dispatch of December 1935, got me to thinking about ways that we need to search newspapers. In this case, it was the typos and errors that made several key points. This clipping was located the old fashioned way though–a manual search […]

It looks like a typo on the 1870 census in Walker Township, Hancock County, Illinois for the family of James and Elizabeth Rampley—and it is. They did not have two sons named John–the 23 year old should have been enumerated as James. Just goes to show that the census taker can make mistakes.And keep in […]

I never thought my family was the kind to write letters to their Congressman. I was wrong. Apparently my great-great-grandmother was just that kind of person–especially when it involved her pension. One has to admire her gumption, she didn’t even wait to get home to Illinois to write her complaint and apparently wrote her Congressman […]

I really had no idea what to expect from the “pardon from the Illinois governor” file for William Kile. I expected a petition for early release and maybe a few letters about his behavior while incarcerated, but also ran across this letter from October of 1862. Apparently Kile wanted to join his four sons  and […]