Archives

Land Records Showed the Way

One of the first stumbling blocks I encountered in my research was the family of my great-great-great-grandfather Peter Andrews (1814-1882), father of my great-great-grandmother Rebecca (Andrews) Whetstone, who married Absalom K. Whetstone of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. A handy county-history biography of one of Rebecca and Absalom’s sons-in-law revealed the...

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Researching New Places

I’ve recently had occasion to give several library talks about researching in places that are new to you. Generally, family historians start by doing research in the county and state where their ancestors lived most recently. There is a good chance that they know about the area–what it looks...

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Learning Ancestry.com

Yesterday I gave a short, basic talk on learning to use the popular genealogy website Ancestry for the Monument chapter, National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. I provided a one-page handout–since we were a few copies short, I decided to post the handout here. Since it was confined...

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Tips for Attaching Trees to Your DNA Results

Today AncestryDNA announced that they sold 1.4 million DNA test kits in the fourth quarter of 2016, setting a sales record for the quarter and bringing their DNA database over three million participants.[1. “Ancestry Sets AncestryDNA Sales Record Over Holiday Period and Fourth Quarter,” 10 January 2017, Ancestry Corporate,...

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