Even seemingly meaningless clippings like this reference to a broken hip can be useful. This item tells me several things–that my ancestor was institutionalized at the Bartonville Hospital and that he was alive on 25 July 1911. If this event had happened before vital registration, the date may have been more significant. And, if these […]

It is not fancy, but it is functional. I find it easier to make initial drawings in pencil. Using the BLM search results and the BLM tract books as described in an earlier post, I created a simple map showing the original landowners in section 29 of Township 22-5 in Tipton County, Indiana. There was no […]

At first it appears confusing. One of my AncestryDNA matches shows us as sharing 20 cM of DNA and yet the longest segment is 22 cM. It’s not a typographical error and the AncestryDNA website is not messed up. It is based on Ancestry’s procedure for handling what are perceived to be bits of shared […]

The ability to merge sources (particularly census) into a tree at Ancestry.com is really a nice one. However, one must be careful not to indicate that a source says something it does not. The reasons are pretty obvious–but here’s an example with the names changed. Thomas Smith was born in Harford County, Maryland, on 2 […]

This is one of the pages from the guardianship of Silas and Laura Barcus from Champaign County, Illinois, in the 1870s. This statement from the guardian dated 1877 indicates that Laura was also known as Ellen.One never knows where these alternate names will appear. And just as a note, in this case, the guardian of […]

We’ve changed a few names and details to make the example slightly easier to follow. Henry and Melinda Smith owned a one hundred acre piece of property in Ohio in the 1840s. Their dates of death are not known and there is no probate file for either of them, but there are three quit claim […]

John Tankersly purchased the horse of Thomas Sledd in the early 1800s in Amherst County, Virginia, but he was not the first person to use the horse that Thomas apparently had no personal use for himself. Before Thomas Sledd sold his horse in Amerst County, Virginia, in the early 1800s, he had loaned it to […]

It is easy to criticize indexers and transcriptionists for making mistakes. But there are times when it is easy to see how such “mistakes” are made. This 1964 California death certificate for Georgiana Elliott makes the point. Box 9 is for “Maiden name and birthplace of mother.” The clerk has entered “unk, McKeown, Pennsylvania.” Box […]

An online tree has the name of my ancestor’s wife for a couple who were married in approximately 1800. It’s a personal tree created by one submitter whose email bounces, whose user name on the site is no help in identifying them and whose tree contains no sources. I am probably going to give no […]

All of us have the occasional relative that for one reason or another we have not researched as much as we would like. I have several of those relatives and decided to start working on them as a diversion, a way to get outside my usual set of people and circumstances that I work on, […]