Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
The photograph of my Mother pushing a doll in a stroller was taken in the 1940s. That I’m sure of. What I am less certain of is the location. Given where Mom and her grandparents lived, I’m reasonably certain the photograph was taken in Hancock County, Illinois. But where within the county I am not […]
The schedule for the Southern California Genealogical Society’s annual Genealogy Jamboree has gone live and registrations are now being processed. I’ll be giving two talks. One is on converting ancestral stories to children’s stories and the other is on DNA analysis when you have quite a few double and triple relationships to reasonably close cousins. […]
I recently rediscovered a letter my grandmother’s niece wrote to her in 1938. A little Google searching determined that the niece recently passed away and I decided to reach out to her one grandchild. I mentioned the letter and offered to share pictures of it if she was interested. She was happy to get a […]
This was a little thought exercise I undertook partially for my own entertainment and partially to remind me of what people could know–particularly information in county histories and other published materials written before they were born. My knowledge of any years of birth in this discussion are, by the very nature of time and the […]
It was December of 1799 and the family of Isaac Rucker, Senr., of Amherst County, Virginia, wanted to allot his widow, Mildred, her dower in his farm and allot to his children their proportion of the estate. Isaac’s widow and her children signed the document. Her sons actually signed the document. It was different for […]
We aren’t always able to get time frames when people die in locations and time periods when vital records are not recorded. In some cases, other records allow us to ascertain a specific date of death for an individual. The date a will was signed often can be a “last alive” date for an individual. […]
I have at least four copies of this photograph of my Ufkes great-grandparents taken around the time of their marriage in Hancock County, Illinois, in 1916, possibly more. It was not worth the time of going through all my photographs in order to see if there was one more copy in my collection that has […]
