Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
Every finding aid or source we use was created by humans. No matter how careful we are and how much we proofread, errors are bound to occasionally creep in to a series of records. That’s why manual searches are sometimes necessary when the index fails and why people are sometimes left out of records entirely. […]
Fold3.com‘s “Registers of Enlistments in the United States Army, 1798-1914,” (taken from page 248 of roll 23, National Archives and Records Administration microfilm publication M233. The page is headed with the phrase “for the War with Mexico”) contains the enlistment information for the “older” Andrew Trautvetter. The enlistment entry indicated this Andrew was 19 years […]
Fold3.com‘s “Registers of Enlistments in the United States Army, 1798-1914,” (taken from page 36 of roll 34, National Archives and Records Administration microfilm publication M233, page 196) contains the enlistment information for the “younger” Andrew Trautvetter. I’m not certain the two Andrew Trautvetters found in “Never Assume There is Only One” are actually […]
Pre-1850 census records in the United States are notorious for only indicating the names of heads of households. The 1845 Michigan State Census for St. Clair County, Michigan lists adjacent entries for Benjamin Butler and Anson Butler in Wales Township. Benjamin’s entry indicated the presence of one male under 10, one male over 21 and […]
Banner ads were pulled from this site when we moved to the new domain. I’ve long felt that they busy the site and we’ve decided to drop that type of advertising from our site in an attempt to give the blog a cleaner look. I do have an affiliate relationship with the following sites: Ancestry.com […]
Never assume a name is unusual. A search on Andrew Trautvetter resulted in two matches on Fold3.com from the “Army Register of Enlistments 1798-1914.” The entries included approximate years of birth (inferred from ages), so they probably weren’t the same man. The registers were also from twenty years apart (1847 and 1867). The 1847 entry was the most likely reference […]
There’s a search lesson in this newspaper article that has absolutely nothing to do with Goldenstein’s 1921 death in a hotel in Kansas City. While his first name is mentioned in the article, the text is apparently so faint that searches for “Henry Goldenstein” did not locate this item from 17 July 1921. This item […]
Assignments on bounty land warrants are always interesting. Many recipients of these warrants did not actually travel to federal lands and stake out their own claim. Instead they assigned them to someone who was willing to make that claim. Some of those individuals who purchased the warrants actually patented real property themselves, others assigned them […]
