Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
This was posted to the group page I have for Genealogy Tip of the Day on Facebook and it generated some discussion about how the first name could be reasonably interpreted. Our discussion was somewhat hypothetical as other handwriting on the page was not viewed. This was done intentionally as many indexes are created in just […]
I’ve been working in digital newspaper collections lately and this newspaper clipping, from the Mendon [Illinois] Dispatch of December 1935, got me to thinking about ways that we need to search newspapers. In this case, it was the typos and errors that made several key points. This clipping was located the old fashioned way though–a manual search […]
It looks like a typo on the 1870 census in Walker Township, Hancock County, Illinois for the family of James and Elizabeth Rampley—and it is. They did not have two sons named John–the 23 year old should have been enumerated as James. Just goes to show that the census taker can make mistakes.And keep in […]
I never thought my family was the kind to write letters to their Congressman. I was wrong. Apparently my great-great-grandmother was just that kind of person–especially when it involved her pension. One has to admire her gumption, she didn’t even wait to get home to Illinois to write her complaint and apparently wrote her Congressman […]
I really had no idea what to expect from the “pardon from the Illinois governor” file for William Kile. I expected a petition for early release and maybe a few letters about his behavior while incarcerated, but also ran across this letter from October of 1862. Apparently Kile wanted to join his four sons and […]
Sometimes one has to shift one’s point of view. You can tell people that everything’s “not online.” You can type it in uppercase letters to visually shout. But, for some, until you show them something interesting that was “not online,” or you tell them that you solved a problem with sources that were only in […]
This comes from a map in the Railroad Collection at the Library of Congress. This one for Hancock County, Illinois, was one of Galbraith’s railway mail service maps, published in Chicago in 1897 and drawn Frank H. Galbraith. It can be seen completely at https://www.loc.gov/item/98688467/ I’m trying to figure out what each of the pictures […]
There are several reasons why deeds don’t often tell genealogists as much as we would like, but here is a good one: money. This image comes from the 1891 Illinois Revised Statutes and indicates that the current recording fee at that point in time was 8 cents for every one hundred words. Chances are no […]
The 1910 census for your relative indicates that she was 60 years of age and was born in Ohio. You have a date of birth for your ancestor of 5 January 1850 with the location being Jackson Township, Coshocton County, Ohio. If you connect sources to dates and locations in your genealogy database, should you […]
