My grandfather’s youngest sister, my great-aunt Ruth, passed away in Des Plaines, Illinois, on 6 January 2019. The following is the obituary that ran in the local newspapers. Ruth Ufkes was born on a farm east of Basco, Illinois, on August 7, 1931, the daughter of Fred and Tena (Janssen) Ufkes. She graduated from Carthage […]

My maternal grandmother, Dorothy (Habben) Ufkes, probably “did the math” on this page in her copy of the “Ufkes” book. The image was originally going to be used to remind readers of the importance of not subtracting the year of birth from the year of death to arrive at an individual’s age. The Fred J. […]

We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: facts cannot be owned and facts cannot be copyrighted I can spend $20,000 on research and documents in order to establish that Thomas Fakeancestor was born on 12 June 1802 in Nosuchtown, Vermont. I can spend months analyzing those records. I can give myself high blood pressure […]

It is important to understand what this database is. It is an index of various indexes to naturalization records. It is not an index to the actual records themselves. The index entry for Samuel Neill links to a digital image of an index card for Samuel that has microfilmed by the National Archives as a […]

I recently posted to my personal Facebook wall: Ethnicity estimates: a marketing tool that ends up making people question the whole thing. We’ve mentioned the ethnicity results before here. For the most part, my view is that they are entertainment except in situations where a parent or grandparent is totally unknown (and then the estimates […]

Join Michael on one of these research trips in 2019: Salt Lake City’s Family History Library Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

The 2 April 1902 will of Barbara Haase includes the names of two witnesses. One was written in English and the other was written in German. I didn’t do too bad of a job reading them, but wish I had read the entire set of documents from Barbara’s probate before I did.   The subpoena […]

Let’s just say this image comes from the “insanity” record of a relative. “On the 6th of June she developed a sever[sic] attack of delusional insanity with homicidal tendancy, which has continued up to the present time.” This document was dated June 14. It is a late nineteenth century record. How much of this would you […]

It always pays to read the entire document and think about the entire document, not just select portions of it. Sound research methods require it, like those discussed in Evidence Explained  and the BCG Genealogy Standards Manual.  The image shown in this post is a larger portion of the 1905 mortgage mentioned in a blog post recently. I […]

These were my “not New Year’s Resolutions” from 2015—but they are worth repeating. I’m not big on resolutions so I won’t make them. Instead we’ll take a different approach to the new year. Here are some research suggestions to remember in 2015: Use contemporary [to the problem] maps Cite sources Avoid using record transcriptions Determine a record’s […]