I’ve been using a death register from Adams County, Illinois, in the 1870 and 1880 time period. It’s been an interesting experience to say the least. The entries in the death register appear to have been created from the actual death certificates. That means that technically what is in the death register is secondary information […]

I’ve known about Theodore Trautvetter’s disappearance from Warsaw, Illinois, in the early 1890s. I also know that the middle-aged farmer returned home from his absence and lived out the rest of his life in the area. This post is not about that. It’s a quick reminder about a few things involving newspapers. The last name […]

We are offering another session of our 5 part series on US land records that runs weekly in February and March. Details are on our announcement page.

One of the reasons for having my father-in-law do a DNA test at AncestryDNA was to see if I could make any headway on the ancestors of his ancestor, Samuel Trask. Samuel was born approximately in 1814 in Boston and moved to the Midwest by the 1840s where he married and had a family. There […]

Downloading images from websites for personal research use is always advised. Then the researcher has the images even if they no longer can access them online for one reason or another. While I should rename files as I download them, I will admit that I do not always do this and often wait until later. […]

The picture based on my Mom’s memories got me thinking about genealogical research and how we put pieces of information together, how we remember information, and how we create a picture of an individual based up information we have obtained. The items in Mom’s picture all existed. None of them were figments of her imagination. […]

The red rocker in the picture is nearly eighty years of age and is in amazingly good shape. I have it. It’s color is still vibrant given how much time has passed. The table and chairs have had the light blue paint stripped and have been refinished in a natural color, but are still functional. […]

AncestryDNA‘s ethnicity estimates now include East Frisia–more affectionately known as Ostfriesland. I’m glad to see they’ve started to work on refining geographic areas within Europe, but I’m still viewing these estimates as pretty much entertainment because they are estimates based upon some actual data, some assumptions, and some guesswork. The only time I put stock […]

Ancestry.com’s 1920 census index transcription for Nancy J. Rampley of St. Albans’ Township, Hancock County, Illinois, correctly transcribes her “race” as “white.” It’s easy to read on the actual census. But while looking at Ancestry.com’s new “StoryScout” entry for Nancy, I wondered why it was talking about voting rights for African-Americans. The county in which […]

One of my DNA matches, Katherine, is a descendant of my ancestor, Samuel Sargent. Her tree indicates that she descends from the same Samuel Sargent that I do. To be certain she and I were actually related through Samuel Sargent—and that there was not some other shared ancestor I simply had not located on her […]