Michael John Neill's Genealogy Website
One of the challenges of using microfilmed images is that a sense of perspective has been stripped away. The clues of color and the unwritten and undigitized contextual clues one has when one holds the actual paper are gone. The problems are not so bad when the digital images are of bound books or individual […]
THE CENSUS TAKER COMETH,” by Michael John Neill (c) 2014 Michael John Neill–this article originally appeared in the Ancestry Daily News and is used by the author on his blog with permission. It is June 3, 1860. Anna Gufferman, who is twelve years old, sees a stranger approaching her small home. He looks reasonably dressed and does not […]
My recent post, “Does It Matter If You Remove the Blank Space?” discussed whether or not the removal of blank space in document image needed to be included as an annotation to the image itself. A reader commented that a comparison with the original image would have been helpful. The first image in this post […]
The image accompanying this post is one I plan on using in an upcoming post on the records from the “East Frisia, Germany, Fire Insurance Registration, 1768-1937“ which were recently released on Ancestry.com. This post isn’t about those records. It’s about whether or not I need to include a comment on my image indicating that I modified […]
Genealogy methodology indicates that we perform an exhaustive search before we attempt to reach a “final” genealogical conclusion. I have an ancestor, Ira William Sargent (born early 1840s in Ontario, Canada) who is enumerated in the 1850, 1860, 1880, 1900, and 1910 census in the United States. I cannot find him in the 1870. If […]
