The Genealogy & Family History Social Network

All Blog Posts (3,108)

Why Seperate Church and State? Combine!

Before you get upset, this post is not about politics and faith, but about genealogical clues to ancestors' lives. In my research, I have found the records kept by various church groups to be of immense help in learning about my ancestors' lives and travels. Such records combined with "state" documents, incl. census reports, official land deeds, wills, and court cases are often all we have to go on -- evidence-wise -- apart from word-of-mouth family stories (which may or may not be… Continue

Added by William S Dean on April 13, 2010 at 10:16am — No Comments

Immigrants to Nutfield, New Hampshire

It is well known that Nutfield was founded by a group of Ulster refugees, Scots Irish Presbyterians fleeing the violence of Northern Ireland for New England. They were not welcome to settle in Boston, so in 1719 a group came to settle in New Hampshire. They called their new home “Nutfield” after the abundance of nut bearing trees in the…

Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on April 13, 2010 at 9:27am — No Comments

Apple for genealogy

There is a commonly inaccurate perception that there are no programs for

doing genealogy on Apple Macintosh computers. As it turns out, the list

of available programs is very limited, and there are barely enough

offerings to make the Macintosh a viable platform for those doing their

family history. But there are at least two or three programs that

compete favorably with anything available on the Windows/PC type

computers.

The now old Personal Ancestral… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 13, 2010 at 8:30am — No Comments

Apple Computers and genealogy -- all things great and small

My earliest attempts to use computers for genealogy began with an Apple

II with a primitive program that was entirely text based and used a dot

matrix printer with fan-fold paper. I remember that I ended up

re-entering my entire file a number of times either due to data crashes

or to incompatible upgrades. The amount of information about each

individual and family was minimal, but the promise of organization and

convenience was worth the effort to keep entering… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 12, 2010 at 9:03am — No Comments

John L. Powell

Looking for info on John L. Powell. 1860 census shows Burlington City, Wife Sarah and son? Alfred. Alfred is G Grandfather. Any info on John would be appreciated.

Added by Robert G. Powell on April 11, 2010 at 6:05am — No Comments

Economical with the truth?

Time to review what I thought I knew about Robert Forscutt and his sister Elizabeth. The family wedding (from which I have a photo showing Robert) took place in the September quarter of 1902. My great aunt, from whom I obtained the photo, was not born until 1904, so she could not have been present at the wedding. On the other hand, she would have known many of the family members who were there. Eileen's mother did not die until 1953 and her sister was alive until 1973. Eileen could have been…

Continue

Added by John Matthews on April 11, 2010 at 3:00am — No Comments

Photos

I have added some more Hooper photos, if anyone would like to look at them. I am scanning and posting them on,so, I am getting them on slowly. Keep looking for new pictures.

Added by Tammy Mellard Wheeler on April 10, 2010 at 10:08am — No Comments

Charles Lee - the Traveling Uncle

Charles is the third child of Edwin Lee. As in the blog about Edwin he didn't show up in any Federal Census until the 1870s. He was married to Elizabeth Van Norwick and they lived in Binghamton NY. He was an Engineer but I'm not sure which railroad company he worked for while in New York.

He had two daughters born in New York - Alice and Sadie Feiam. Alice was born in January 1876 and Sadie in 1881.

My cousin and I surmised the reason he moved to Minnesota was…

Continue

Added by PD Vasil` on April 9, 2010 at 10:02am — No Comments

Using information from New FamilySearch

A few days ago, I had a patron at the Mesa Regional Family History

Center ask me about a problem she was having with New FamilySearch.

She had a huge pile of printouts from her Personal Ancestral File

program and was methodically going through each one and comparing the

information to that found in New FamilySearch. She was… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 9, 2010 at 8:37am — No Comments

GenealogyWise -- all's well that ends well

Fast work and an immediate response from the staff at GenealogyWise

seems to have stemmed the tide of spam for the time being. Thanks to

their rapid response, the issue was resolved by having the blog posts

reviewed before going online. I might suggest that given some time,

there could be a way to automate that procedure by having a holding file

where the titles and text could be reviewed more rapidly. It… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 9, 2010 at 8:35am — No Comments

Spam blog posts take over GenealogyWise

GenealogyWise is a really

dynamic and useful social networking site for genealogists.

GenealogyWise is part of FamilyLink which if you keep tracing back

through links, is basically Paul Allen and his staff who also run

WorldVitalRecords and a lot more. Many of the members post all or part

of their own blogs on the GenealogyWise blog posts. Lately, the blog

posts coming through Google Reader have been hijacked by spam drug

sellers. My… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 8, 2010 at 8:18am — 2 Comments

Great Opportunities for Learning in Second Life

We've submitted bylaws for approval, and now the proposed chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists in Second Life (APG-SL) will be having our third meeting, tonight, Thursday, April 7, at 5:30 pm Second Life time (which is Pacific Time). In keeping with the goals of the organization, we will be having a presentation by a very well-known speaker, on Revolutionary War Research. Members and non-members are invited to attend this presentation.… Continue

Added by tami osmer glatz on April 8, 2010 at 7:04am — No Comments

First Parish Church, Derry, New Hampshire

On Wednesday 28 October 2009, the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance announced the state’s annual “Seven to Save” campaign and the First Parish Church in East Derry earned a spot on the list. The First Parish congregation has been in Derry since the original Scots Irish settlers held a religious meeting of thanksgiving under a tree in…

Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on April 7, 2010 at 4:04pm — No Comments

Affinities: Genetics, Coincidence, or What?

A recent blogger here mentioned something about research findings that make your hair stand on end. I'm wondering how many people have a particular affinity for something, especially historically-speaking, and then later discover in genealogical research that their ancestor was involved in what you show an affinity for. I don't mean talent, like in music or art or something.

Here's an example. Since I was kid, I always liked and felt strongly about the events in the book and movies… Continue

Added by William S Dean on April 7, 2010 at 10:21am — 1 Comment

What I have learned from genealogy blogs

I guess the first thing I have learned is that there are a lot more

blogs than I have time to read. I keep finding new ones all the time and

get more and more amazed at the tremendous variety of genealogical

experiences. I have learned that blogging is takes the place of the old

home town newspaper on an international scale. The posts give you

insight into people's lives all over the world. Today's report on Google

Analytics shows my posts being read in 39… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 6, 2010 at 10:12pm — 1 Comment

Genealogy on a Mac?

It has now been a number of months since I junked my PC and went back to

working almost exclusively on an Apple Macintosh iMac. I say

that my work is almost exclusive because I still own a PC Laptop from

HP. I use the laptop to run my scanning station. I mentioned from time

to time that I am running a program called Parallels Desktop. I have worked on

literally… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 5, 2010 at 9:02pm — No Comments

When a co-incidence in genealogy makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end

Well, we all know co-incidences happen, but sheesh, just lately genealogically speaking they're jumping out at me. For instance.

Have connected with a Jewish Lady for my Isaacs research and somehow we get talking about "The Camps" and I say my dad (not Jewish) was in Somme Kasserne as a…

Continue

Added by Jo Kotylak on April 5, 2010 at 12:08am — 1 Comment

Unexpected information from a Chelsea pensioner

I first met the Forscutt family more than forty years ago when I began my interest in family history. My grandmother knew that her mother's maiden name was Forscutt. She thought her grandmother was named Elizabeth, but couldn't remember her grandfather's name. She knew her mother's date of birth, so I obtained her birth certificate and discovered she was illegitimate. This was not something a teenage boy wished to discuss with his Victorian grandmother, so the certificate was quietly placed…

Continue

Added by John Matthews on April 4, 2010 at 12:00pm — No Comments

Part of the New FamilySearch software problem solved

With a lot of help from Luc Comeau at Millenia with Legacy Family Tree, I

finally got the program up and running with New FamilySearch. I

will work on RootsMagic

next,… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 3, 2010 at 9:15pm — No Comments

Some updated programs have data crash with New FamilySearch

New FamilySearch

(NFS)

has just completed a major change in its Application Programming

Interface or API.

Because of this change all of the programs that connect to NFS were

required to upgrade to adapt to the changes. All… Continue

Added by James Tanner on April 3, 2010 at 1:17pm — No Comments