You have to love a death certificate like this one from Mercer County, Illinois. The place of birth for Sarah Smith is listed as “Franklin County.” No state is given. One might think it is Franklin County, Illinois, but it is not. The actual county is in Ohio. My transcription of the death certificate only […]

My copy of Advanced Genetic Genealogy: Techniques and Case Studies, edited by Debbie Parker Wayne has arrived. We will be discussing it in bits and pieces as I have time to go through it and actually read it. It’s not meant to be read from page 1 through the end, although one could certainly read it […]

A search of Googlebooks (http://books.google.com) indicated that the names George and Trautvetter appeared in the 2000 edition of the BCG Standards Manual. The word George may be in the book, but I was reasonably certain the word Trautvetter did not. A search of this specific book on Googlebooks did not locate the word Trautvetter either. No answer on […]

Several county histories indicated that Thomas Rampley and his family moved into Coshocton County, Ohio, in the fall of 1817. There was no specific date and county histories, particularly ones published nearly seventy years after the fact, are not the most reliable of sources. Then there’s the General Land Office tract book for the property […]

The obituary of Martha Jane Luft from the Warsaw Bulletin in March of 1923 mentions her daughter Maria twice–never by name. Martha’s son-in-law, George Kunz, is mentioned twice as well. The failure to mention the daughter by her first name is indicative of the time. Maria’s date of death is listed in her mother Martha’s obituary […]

One of the key components of the “Reasonably Exhaustive Search” is that “at least two sources of independent information items agreeing directly or indirectly” be used in reaching a conclusion (page 84,  Genealogy Standards, Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG), 2nd edition, 2019, published by Ancestry.com) Independent information items have unrelated origins (page 79, Genealogy Standards).  While this […]

I’ve been thinking about “boring ancestors” lately and the feeling by some that it’s necessary to add extraneous “stuff” to your family history in order to liven them up. To that I say “balderdash.” There’s nothing like good ol’ exhaustive research to discover that your ancestors are not all that boring. My children have no […]

I’ve decided to revisit my Irish forebears in an attempt to learn more about them before their life in New Brunswick–particularly my gg-grandmother, Annie Murphy Neill. This is a copy of the marriage bond signed by her husband Samuel Neill and Edward Durbin. Durbin does not appear to have been related to the family (he […]

A picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, but a map definitely is worth a thousand verbal descriptions of the geographic relationship among multiple locations. James Beidler graciously shared with me a few images of maps that will appear in his soon-to-be-released book Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany. Maps are useful to genealogists for several reasons, […]

The settling of estates frequently requires surveys and metes and bounds descriptions of property, regardless of whether the property is in a state where sections and townships are used. The image at the top of this post  is from a survey conducted in 1940 apparently to settle up the estate of John Habben. The survey […]