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To Scan or Photograph?

My mother has approximately 12 years of daily calendar entries in various day planners and other similar fill-in notebooks. How to preserve them is a concern. The entries are short and usually revolve around the weather, farming, who called, who visited, and other short snippets of daily life. They are not diaries with long, detailed […]

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FamilySearch Full-Text Search: Is It Exhaustive?

Genealogists who follow the Genealogy Proof Standard are told to conduct a reasonably exhaustive search. How does the full-text search of some land deeds and probate records at FamilySearch impact that? At this point, using the FamilySearch full-text search of these records simply helps the researcher to find some things–pulling some more low-hanging fruit from […]

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FamilySearch Labs Full Text Search

FamilySearch recently announced the full-text search of various local records–particularly probate court and land records at their FamilySearch Labs site. This site is still in the beta stage, so things may work differently from one visit to another. But this functionality allows researchers to access records that would have required manual, page-by-page searches before. But […]

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Do I Include the Red Saks 5th Avenue Box in the Citation?

Note: The 4th edition of Evidence Explained has just been released by Genealogical Publishing Company. We’ll be featuring it in several blog posts over the coming months. Documenting items in private collections (often housed in just a spare room of someone’s home) is one of the things covered in Evidence Explained. This example illustrating this […]

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Do You Warn Them?

If you encourage a family member to take a genealogy DNA test, do you warn them of the potential to uncover family secrets of which they may be unaware? You may encourage your father’s brother’s child to take a test to help with your (and his) paternal ancestry. The test results may cause them to […]

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He’s Got a Copy

Apparently Conrad Haase had an “original Paper” copy of his naturalization in his hands when he had the Hitchcock County, Nebraska County Clerk create a transcription of that naturalization. The naturalization transcript was used in Haase’s Timber Claim as proof of his citizenship. Haase’s claim was for 160 acres in Section twenty-six of township 4 […]

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