Legacy Family Tree

Genealogy best practice is to start with you, and who better to introduce yourself to future generations than YOU? In this webinar, we will go beyond factual information typically found in family trees to include the essence of who you are. Using easy and fun writing prompts, you will learn to create a unique and revealing written portrait of yourself. You can also share these prompts with other family members, adding their written portraits to your family tree. Your future generations will get to know you, and thank you!

In this presentation Michelle will outline her most important DNA tips with a list of her top ten things you should do if you want to make progress with DNA testing for family history as well as her top ten things you should avoid. These tips will help you be successful on your DNA journey and steer clear of common mistakes and pitfalls.

Segregation extended into death for African Americans, especially for those in the Southern United States. What led to the development of separate funeral homes and burial grounds? This presentation looks at burial practices for African-Americans from the 16th to the 20th century.

We all have lost Elizabeths in our tree. This lecture will discuss how the understanding and application of indirect evidence is such a valuable instrument in your methodology tool-kit. This case study will examine methods and sources that contributed to finding the parents of Elizabeth Wingate (1795-1860) of Baltimore, Maryland.

Based on resources collected for the Net Notes Column of Internet Genealogy which I have authored since 2006. These will be not-yet-published resources from the US, Canada, UK, and from countries around the world. A real smorgasbord of topics, time periods, etc. A little bit of something for everyone.

Learn about 19th and 20th century sources for finding your ancestors’ arrival in New Zealand.

Sometimes our ancestors seem to have appeared out of nowhere. That was the case with William Emmitt Hunter whose life before his 1910 Oklahoma marriage was basically unknown. One record—his application for a Social Security account number—provided self-reported information about his birth in North Carolina and his parents’ names. But his alleged parents could not be found. Without DNA, this case would not have been solved. But DNA revealed that William was born as a Beddingfield, not a Hunter. Additional research identified his name at birth and traced him through multiple marriages, divorces, another alias, and indicated the possible reason why he changed his name and left behind his family and friends to start a new life in Oklahoma.

Name changes, enumerator errors, and terrible informants can combine to create major inconsistencies in documentation. Records that, at first glance, appear to be major mismatches can later turn out to be correct. Researching non-English-speaking immigrant families requires a comfort level with these layered conflicts-upon-conflicts. This session demonstrates how to use logic to confirm that a wrong-name, wrong-age, wrong-everything record can actually be right, with an emphasis on immigrant families. Participants will learn how to transfer that logic to a written proof argument.

Genealogy Standards 38 and 58 strongly express a preference for using original sources. Diligent researching and a few tricks of the trade enable genealogists to find original sources that underlie authored narratives and derivative sources.