Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
I think I’ve seen about every reasonable variant for the last name of Trautvetter that there is, but I don’t remember ever seeing this one: Trautfellow. On 7 May 1885, Christian Troutfetter filed an entry for land in Thomas County, Kansas. The clerk refers to him as Trautfellow in the entry papers. Fortunately the […]
I generally advise anyone with a relative who lived during the era in which Revolutionary War pensions were granted to search those pensions at Fold3.com for that relative. That’s because the pension images there have a full name index and there are more individuals listed in those pensions than just veterans and their widows. Of […]
They are unofficially calling it the “Bureau County ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’” The official title is the “BCGS Ancestor Quest.” The Bureau County, Illinois, Genealogical Society is picking three research problems to feature at their 3 December 2015 meeting. There is no charge for the research, but the focus is Bureau County, Illinois, […]
Names can create all sorts of problems for the genealogist. The first illustration in this post is from a search of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) records at Ancestry.com that was conducted for the name of Sartorius in the location of Carthage, Hancock County, Illinois. The search interface will bring a result as long […]
By popular demand, we’re bringing this course back…. Organizing Genealogical Information: A Short Course With Michael John Neill (scroll down for specific schedule) Organizing information is an important part of genealogical research—perhaps more important than the actual research. This short course (only 3 sessions) is intended to provide the students with exposure to a variety of ways to organize information […]
I’m beginning to think that I do. When writing a recent blog post, I realized that I referred to my great-great-grandmother in two different ways: Noentjelena Grass Noentje Lena Grass It was not just a typographical error. There are documents that refer to her name as Noentjelena and others that refer to her name as […]
In “Father Comes to Visit in the 1880’s and Sponsors Two Grandchildren,” my “non-immigrant” relative’s visit to his immigrant daughter is documented in materials from the 1880s. Johann Gerhard Grass was not a late-in-life immigrant who stayed in the United States. He returned to his homeland. But there’s more to the letter than his short stay […]
I gave the speech over fifteen years ago, when the amount of online information was not what it was today. It was clear then we were headed to a day when access to data would be significantly less restricted by geography and other physical constraints. The title, or the final remark at the end of the […]
Ancestry.com recently announced the “Illinois, Marriage Index, 1860-1920” on their website (it’s probably been there for some time to be honest). In reading the “about” section for this database, it becomes clear that Ancestry.com‘s “Illinois, Marriage Index, 1860-1920” is actually the “Illinois Statewide Marriage Index 1763-1900.”This database is on the Illinois State Archives website and […]
