24-Hour Webinar Marathon

These 3 faiths dominated the 1800s religious scene in the United States. Learn a little of their intertwined history; explore a variety of sample records; and learn strategies for finding church records for Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians.

Are you trying to figure out ways to discover your family history in simple and short ways? Many people believe that family history has to take hours and only those who are retired can do it. Wrong! This class will show simple ways to discover surnames, to learn about yourself, and to create simple family activities in your home.

Over the last 8 years, Backblaze has collected, analyzed, and reported on hard drive and SSD failure. Andy Klein has waded through 166 million records to learn all he can about drive failure and he’d like to share that with you. For example, do different drive models fail at different rates, do bigger drives fail more often, does temperature impact drive failure, and maybe most important – can you predict drive failure. We’ll also compare consumer versus enterprise drives and wrap up by comparing hard drives to SSDs. Join us for a class of what you can really learn from failure – drive failure that is.

The brickwalls of a family tree are no match for prison walls. From intake photo to receipts for cash and clothes when they were released, prisoners in jails and prisons were recorded and documented, often in stunning detail. Learn what records may exist – and where – about your family’s black sheep.

We frequently bemoan the dearth of records left by women, but records left by spinsters and widows can be particularly valuable for reconstructing families when properly analyzed. Many people neglect to research spinsters (women who never married) as they have no descendants, but to whom shall they leave their estates? Extended family! Tracing widows to see who they live with can reveal previously unknown family members. See examples where women’s records have illuminated familial relationships and learn strategies to apply to your own research.

This session will walk attendees through the steps of using a timeline and building a research plan at the same time.

Pasted front and center on page 1 of my great-grandmother’s scrapbook was an illustration of a strikingly beautiful woman in an ostrich-plumed hat. Who was she and why was she there? No name, no date, no newspaper. Tiny bits of the page not glued down enabled me to discover clues to the paper’s likely date and possible location and allowed me to discover the identity of my mystery woman. This case study illustrates what to do with an unknown, undated clipping and how to determine its origins.

Every family has them, ancestors who worked on the land. How can we find out more about them, the farms where they worked and the lives that they led? This session covers a range of sources, many of them under-used, which will help to shed light on the working lives of our rural British ancestors.

Historical records help us confirm what we already know about our family’s past, debunk family myths, and learn new information that may lay beyond the reaches of living memory. Learn how to use the MyHeritage search engine to find records of your ancestors from all over the world.