Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
The hints at Ancestry.com should be used as hints and not as facts. Matching names do not mean matching people. Sometimes it is relatively easy to see that a “match” is not really a “match.” The image in this post is one that Ancestry.com suggests for my Bernard Dirks. My Bernard Dirks is in the United States […]
[re-posted with some additions from 22 April 2014 as we migrate old content to the new blog] I’ve searched for my mother’s immigrant ancestors in passenger manifests for over thirty years. All of her families immigrated to the United States from Ostfriesland, Germany between the 1850s and 1883. Most of them have been found on […]
The following databases are showing as updated since our last posting: United States Census, 1820 Kentucky, Vital Record Indexes, 1911-1999 Missouri, County Marriage, Naturalization, and Court Records, 1800-1991 How updated these are I can’t say. They have been on the FamilySearch site for some time.
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I recently posted this image to the Facebook page for Genealogy Tip of the Day. It generated a significant amount of discussion. It’s a Ancestry.com five generation pedigree chart on my paternal grandmother with “hints” that Ancestry.com has found for several individuals. I lamented that there were no hints for the two ancestors of my grandmother who are among my most […]
[reposted from 10 July 2012 with updated links and a few additional comments in brackets] Ancestry.com recently updated their “U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900.” The title of this database is somewhat misleading–the “marriage records” in this database are from family group charts compiled mainly by researchers in the 1970s and 1980s. While some of the […]
Usually in United States records it is an English speaker who had issues with a German name. In this record, the situation has been reversed. In 1886, two children of George and Maria (Luft) Kunz were to be baptized at the church in Tioga, Hancock County, Illinois. Today this congregation, which was heavily populated by German […]
The local paper contained a brief discussion of the death of Henry Goldenstein along with an obituary for him written by the local Lutheran minister. The hope had been that the local paper would include details that were not included in the article about Henry’s death that were published in the Quincy, Illinois, newspaper. We […]
Page numbers are integral to genealogical citations. It’s a problem when after we’ve left the research facilityy we realize that we’ve forgotten to include the page number for a document which we’ve copied. When obtaining an item from a mortgage book in Hancock County, Illinois, recently I made just that mistake. I made certain to get […]
I’m really curious as to the identity of the Mary M. Love to whom my great-grandparents mortgage was assigned by the original lender in 1919. However, before I spend too much online time trying to find her, it might be best to find the remaining documents regarding her actual involvement in the Trautvetter property. As […]
