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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Indexers Rock!

I posted recently about the five-million-name goal for 1940 census indexing on July 2. More than 46,000 indexers and arbitrators responded to the challenge. In less than sixteen hours, they met the five-million-name goal, but they didn’t stop there. End result: over seven million names indexed and three million...

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1940 Census Indexing Update

Thanks to more than 137,000 volunteers, the 1940 census is seventy-five percent indexed, months ahead of schedule! Volunteers have indexed over 105 million names, and twenty-nine states and territories are searchable online.[1. Dennis Brimhall, “CEO Corner: Volunteers and the 1940 Census Effort,” FamilySearch Blog (https://familysearch.org/blog/ceo-corner-volunteers-1940-census-effort/ : accessed 1 July...

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FamilySearch Indexing

Do you index for FamilySearch? I do. It’s a wonderful way to contribute to the genealogical community, and also a way to say “thank you” to FamilySearch for their generosity in providing free online access to the riches of the Family History Library’s microfilm collections. Did you know that...

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