Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
Revolutionary widow Eleanor Fugate of Scott County, Kentucky, received a military land warrant for 160 acres in 1856 based upon the military service of her late her husband, Randall Fugate. We’ve mentioned Eleanor in earlier posts because she was significantly younger than her husband–approximately twenty years–and not of an age where one automatically assumes the […]
It is unrealistic to expect records obtained in genealogy research to be completely consistent. Names will be spelled a variety of ways, places of birth will vary as to location, ages or dates of birth may suggest a decades-long birth date. It’s human nature to occasionally be inconsistent when providing information, especially as one ages and […]
Barbara (Siefert) Bieger Fennan Haase Haase (about 1825-1903) lived a life that generated many records. She also lived a life that was atypical for her era. She: was widowed in her late twenties with two small children in a town where she had no relatives besides her children ran a tavern in a Mississippi River […]
Negative evidence is not bad. Negative evidence does not mean something bad has happened. Negative evidence is when something you would expect to appear does not appear. It takes a familiarity with the records being used and the context in which they were created in order to determine if negative evidence exists. In earlier posts […]
In “Was Sophia Derle Born in 1807 or 1808?” three sources providing her date of birth were analyzed because they varied. To summarize the discussion, it was concluded that her tombstone and death entry in the church records were not as reliable for her date of birth as was her baptismal entry in the records […]
The entry from the church records of the Bethany United Church of Christ in Tioga, Hancock County, Illinois, are pretty clear: Sophia Elisabeth Trautfetter[sic] was born on 29 September 1808 in “Helmashausen Sachsen Wesmar.” Of course the information was made as a part of the church register for her death in 1888. Where the information […]
One record or even a series of records can be entirely correct, entirely wrong, or somewhere in between. When one only has one record of set of records to use, it can be difficult to tell which is the case. The 1869-1870 era probate of Michael Trautvetter in Hancock County, Illinois, indicated he had the […]
Sometimes a person thinks that they have seen just about every spelling variation for a name that there is. And then something else comes along. The clerk (or someone) thought the maiden name of the mother on a 1904 Cuyahoga County, Ohio, birth certificate said “Snoutfeather.” That actually seems to be a misreading of the […]
I was searching the issues of the Prairie Farmer that are online in the “Farm, Field, and Fireside” collection at the University of Illinois. I was not looking for anyone in particular. I searched for “ufkes” as I often do and failed to locate an item that I know I had found before involving my great-grandfather. […]
