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How to find your American Veteran Ancestors

Abijah Franklin Hitchings, Civil War, Co. I, 8th Reg. Mass. Vol. Inf.

Veterans Day 2009

The further your family tree goes back in time, the more chances you have of finding an ancestor, sibling, or distant cousin who served as a soldier or sailor. My first advice is to continue collecting oral histories, and asking all your older relatives about anyone they might have known who served in the military. Use those oral… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 11, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments

Can somebody tell me hwo i can read chortsbook and list tell people,Hope you unerstod me.Living in Norway,

Added by Jan Eskild Jensen on November 11, 2009 at 7:40am — No Comments

Veterans Week (Nov 5th to Nov 11th)

The theme of Veteran’s Week this year is “How Will You Remember”.

The Library and Archives Canada has put on their website "Welcome to Canada at War: a Guide to Library and Archives Canada Recalling the Canadian War Experience".

For information on the role that the Canadian military played during the Second World War, please go to the virtual exhibit called Faces of War at a… Continue

Added by William Bruce Hillman on November 9, 2009 at 1:59pm — No Comments

Legacy Genealogy Cruise 2010 - Australia/New Zealand - Nov 8-21

The 7th annual Legacy Genealogy Cruise, held November 8-21, 2010, starts and ends in Sydney, Australia and visits the following New Zealand ports: Fjordland National Park, Dunedin (Port Chalmers), Christchurch (Lyttelton), Wellington, Napier, Tauranga, Auckland, and Bay of Islands. We will sail on Princess Cruises Sun Princess ship.

Click here… Continue

Added by Geoff Rasmussen on November 9, 2009 at 10:44am — No Comments

Entire U.S. Census goes Interactive with Footnote

October 29th, 2009 | Written by Tyler

Today Footnote.com announced it will digitize and create a searchable database for all publicly available U.S. Federal Censuses, ranging from the first U.S. Census taken in 1790 to the most current public census from 1930. Through its partnership with the National Archives, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million images featuring over half a billion names to its extensive online record collection.

With over 60 million historical… Continue

Added by Stefani Twyford on November 9, 2009 at 10:06am — 2 Comments

Video Biography Project In Mississippi

From February 2, 2009

This past weekend Isabelle and I flew to Northern Mississippi to work with a new client on creating a tribute video biography. It was a really fun, albeit short trip but we managed to cram a lot into two days.

We flew a commercial airline from Houston to Jackson Mississippi on Saturday where our client picked us up in his private plane and flew us another half hour to a smaller airport in the Northern part of the state. Isabelle was a bit nervous… Continue

Added by Stefani Twyford on November 9, 2009 at 8:40am — No Comments

Take a look at books

Having spent a goodly portion of my life in libraries, both as a patron and a library employee, I am aware that there are a lot of things about seeing books on shelves and having them to read that are lost when the books are digitized. The greatest loss is the synergy of having books grouped together. No catalog or index can give you the perspective of reading the shelves, that is, looking at each book in turn about a particular subject. Whatever the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System of… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 9, 2009 at 8:34am — No Comments

The Ballad of Cassandra Southwick

“Ballad of Cassandra Southwick”

For Bill West's Great American Local Poem Genealogy Challenge

There are lots of interesting characters in New England, like Cassandra, and many have had their stories made into poems. Longfellow tangled the story of another ancestor, Myles Standish, in his famous courtship poem, and the story of Paul Revere was one of his most famous, and most inaccurate, poems. In this poem, John Greenleaf Whittier got… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 9, 2009 at 8:00am — No Comments

FamilyInsight and Windows 7 on an iMac

FamilyInsight is a highly useful add-on tool for Personal Ancestral File (PAF) users who want to do many of the things that PAF won't do, particularly with New FamilySearch. The features of the program give PAF real utility, but unfortunately you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. (Actually, you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but the question is, who would want to?). PAF is not going to be supported in the future by FamilySearch and as time goes on and more and more… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 8, 2009 at 6:20pm — No Comments

How do I do genealogy?

When I was young and had time to do things other than genealogy, I used to practice archery from time to time. I would set up various targets to shoot at in the yard, which was big enough to use for the activity. Inevitably, I would shoot all of my arrows and miss the target at least a couple of times. In targets, think cardboard box, not the nice straw kind with big circles. Anyway, there were a couple things I did know when I started to search for my lost arrows. First, the arrow could only… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 7, 2009 at 6:46pm — 1 Comment

MY CREOLE ANCESTORS OF SOUTHEASTERN LOUISIANA

I have been meticulously going through my creole ancestral line from southeastern Louisiana, but the hardest feat of all is that my creole ancestors had kept an immense amount of secrets for which have hugely deterred their future descendants from growing the family tree. The most effective genealogical site of all has been ancestry.com for which I have gotten a wealth of information by searching through the U.S. Federal Census recently. It was definitely a wonderful ancestral site to connect… Continue

Added by Brittiney G. Riggins on November 7, 2009 at 5:12pm — No Comments

Surnames, My my we have some Surnames

Surnames are interesting they tend to litterally drive us to hunt in weird places and do strange things.

Surnames are very early in origin in some forms, late in origin in other forms. Whether your native or non,

surnames have been used around and around. Son of Peter son of David son of William, become, Peterson

Davidson, and Williamson, now if your Russian it still works. OV and OFF are the derrivatives but today I can not

remember which work for… Continue

Added by Susi (Susan C Jones) Pentico on November 7, 2009 at 2:20pm — No Comments

Researching Dead or Alive

Eliza Early Swain", Hutchinson;s Danville Virginia, Greene Georgia, Philadelphia,, PA

have had no success in finding Eliza Early ggrandmother searching since 1998???

Added by shelby on November 7, 2009 at 6:30am — No Comments

Friday's Fun and Friday's Done for Friday's Following

Following Frida,y O yes, Following Friday is Saturday and Sunday etc. But we know that is not what the intent was for the blog post. :>)

I posted my response on my blogger.com page but thought I would make more comments here. For those of you who

have not started to blog or not sure how. It is a great source for getting information out to family, friends and kin. It breaks up the tedious sometimes reading of Wills, Deeds, County HIstories etc. It can enlighten you and help… Continue

Added by Susi (Susan C Jones) Pentico on November 6, 2009 at 9:47pm — No Comments

Genealogist's view of Windows 7

I have been running Windows XP since shortly after its release. After reading many reviews, I elected not to upgrade my home computer to Windows Vista but some time ago, our office computers were all upgraded. So I have been running both Windows Vista and my older versions of Windows XP for a considerable time. During the past week, I have been working with Windows 7 installed on my iMac using Parallels Desktop. I feel that I have a pretty good level of experience with both Vista and XP to… Continue

Added by James Tanner on November 6, 2009 at 9:05pm — No Comments

Gates family of Groton CT and then Leyden,MA Peter Gates who was his father?

Looking for the Father of Peter Gates from Groton, New London, Connecticut. Peter was born 26 Feb 1750. An ancestry tree puts Peter as the son on Zebadiah Gates and Sarah Woodmansey but the Book (found on Google Books) Stephen Gates of Hingham and Landcaster, Massachusetts and his descendants by Charles Otis Gates does not support this. It has a completely different list for children of Zebadiah Gates which does not include children: Mary, John, David (brother of Peter who owned land with him… Continue

Added by Gwynn Socolich on November 6, 2009 at 2:18pm — No Comments

Desire Avery and Irena Avery are they related?

I am researching two ladies in my collateral line. One is Desire Avery and the other is Irene Avery. Desire Avery married Ephriam Gates whose sister Lephe Gates married John Riddle (Riddell). Desire Avery was born 5 March 1788 in Leyden, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. The other Avery is Irena who married Miles Coon of Manlius, Onondaga New York. Irena Avery was born in 1818 and died in 1903, she is buried in Hillside Cemetery, Palymra, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. One of my research… Continue

Added by Gwynn Socolich on November 6, 2009 at 1:11pm — No Comments

Google Your way to a Quilt

Google your way to a Quilt

Sometimes after I’ve tried the library, the archives, ancestry.com and NEHGS- I next resort to finding genealogy information is just Googling names to see what comes up. Now, with the addition of Google Books, I’m often surprised at what happens. And sometimes names that didn’t draw any hits six months ago suddenly have interesting results. This is what happened to me last week.

My Munroe lineage… Continue

Added by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on November 6, 2009 at 11:37am — No Comments

Is Google Wave the future of collabrative genealogy research?

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and… Continue

Added by William Douglas on November 6, 2009 at 8:30am — 3 Comments

To Build, or not to Build? That is My Ahnentafel Question!

"They" say that "doing genealogy" is an addictive endeavor.

"They" say that it's a waste of time, the past is past and you cannot change it. Even "He" said, "Let the dead bury their dead."

The problem of that is that "He" also talked about eternal life! How that it was available and how that "He" was come to that we might have "... life, and have it more abundantly."

I'm not dead. Neither are my ancestors, "in Him."

I come from a rather large family.… Continue

Added by Joseph A. 'Joe' Hittle on November 6, 2009 at 8:00am — No Comments