There’s often more to a tombstone than just one side. This picture of the tombstone for my great-grandparents is slightly misleading, especially to someone unfamiliar with the family. There is an apparent flag adjacent to the tombstone which appears to be next to Mimka’s side of the stone. Flags are usually placed on a grave […]

Carl Sandburg College’s Corporate and Leisure College will be hosting an all-day ” Beginning with Your Ancestry DNA Matches” with Michael John Neill on Saturday 19 October 2019 on the college’s main campus in Galesburg, Illinois (2400 Tom L. Wilson Blvd.). The sessions will run from 9:00 am until 3:30 pm. This day-long session will […]

There’s been a great deal of talk about potential changes at Ancestry.com. Quite a bit of digital ink has been spilled. Unless you have an investment interest in Ancestry.com or are involved in their management, there’s little (translation: nothing) you can actually do. That’s how it is with most companies. And unless you are employed […]

On what was probably a warm day in June of 1818 in what was probably Bedford County, Virginia, Mary Hart made out an affidavit before Thomas Logwood: upwards of Twenty years ago […] James Orry made a will […] and Left his Land to Mary Parkers four Children (viz) Nancy Parker Aaron Parker Moses Parker […]

FamilySearch allows users to enter in fields in search boxes for those fields even if the information is not included in their database. Sometimes this is because the information was not in the record being indexed. Other times it is simply because the information was not captured when FamilySearch was indexing the information. A case […]

This image comes from the estate of my Peter Bieger which was probated in Hancock County, Illinois, in the mid-1850s. He had twenty gallons of cherry brandy, among a variety of other items, some of which are shown here. The inventory of his estate confirmed what had been suggested from other records: that Peter was […]

I copied the entire file during a recent trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City–The People of the State of Illinois vs. John M. Trautvetter. There are not many details in the case file packet for the case which was based on events that took place in 1898-1899–I was hoping for page […]

Looking at the original is always advised because indexes are occasionally incorrect and (because they are finding aids not transcriptions) sometimes incomplete. That’s old news for most genealogists who have been researching for a while. It’s also something that’s clear in the record entry in “Illinois, County Naturalization Records, 1800-1998” at FamilySearch for a Henry […]

I’ve mentioned the US Patents database at Google before (http://patents.google.com/). I made at least one very minor discovery today on this database and I’m thinking that the search or something has been tweaked since I looked at it several years ago. One of the names I search for in virtually every database is Ufkes. It […]

I’m a reserved fan of ThruLines(tm) at AncestryDNA as long as it is used with the researcher’s brain fully and completely engaged. This unaltered screen shot shows why. Antone Chiaro is shown as being his own nephew. Enough said. These things are clues people. Although one would think in this case that the algorithm that […]