Month: April 2018

Another Reason to Call First

I’ll be passing through Lincoln, Nebraska, on the way home from Salt Lake City later this month. Lincoln is the home to the State Historical Society of Nebraska. Based upon my travel schedule, I could have stopped for one day (Friday) in Lincoln. I could have easily gotten to the library to view the collection […]

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Hanging Shingles

There’s been much gnashing of genealogical teeth over the use of GedMatch to develop a list of potential suspects in a series of rapes and murders committed in California years ago. We will leave the gnashing of teeth to the dental experts. GedMatch is a publicly accessible database. It’s in the fine print of the […]

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Playing with Ancestry’s US Phone Directories 1993-2002

Ancestry.com has updated “U.S. Phone and Address Directories, 1993-2002.” Ancestry.com indicates that the source of this data is: 1993-2002 White Pages. Little Rock, AR, USA: Acxiom Corporation These directories are not perfect. People without phones may not be listed. People with unlisted numbers will not be listed. Some individuals may choose to only use initials. Some […]

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Recording Fees for Deeds

There are several reasons why deeds don’t often tell genealogists as much as we would like, but here is a good one: money. This image comes from the 1891 Illinois Revised Statutes and indicates that the current recording fee at that point in time was 8 cents for every one hundred words. Chances are no […]

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How Precise Can You Be?

I am thinking out loud here. I’m typing up my ahnentafel chart for presentation on my website. One of the issues I have is the precision of the location of an event. Many of my families are clustered in several rural areas, locations are not always overly specific. Genealogists like specifics, but sometimes we have […]

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More than Fifty Letters

A collection at the Nebraska State Historical Society contains over one hundred letters written to a first cousin of my second great-grandfather in the late 19th century. At least a dozen of those letters are actually written by my third great-grandfather, Johann Goldenstein (1814-1891) who spent his entire life in Wrisse, Ostfriesland, Germany. The vast […]

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Professional Genealogy: Preparation, Practice & Standards

Professional Genealogy: Preparation, Practice & Standards edited by Elizabeth Shown Mills is off the presses and ready for  distribution. This volume is an entirely new replacement for the 2001 edition of this well-received guide to developing a career in genealogy. Times have changed. This is a revised guide to developing and maintaining a professional genealogy career […]

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New York, Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers, 1865-1939

Ancestry.com has “New York, Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers, 1865-1939” as  “recently added database.” It is probably more accurate to refer to it as a database that I recently noticed. There are significant biographical details on the prisoners included in this database. The content does vary over time, but ages, place of birth, aliases, names […]

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