Make the most of your research time, by knowing exactly what surnames to research and where. This Webinar Short introduces a spreadsheet tool to help you keep track of surnames.

Have you ever failed to find a surname in an online database search? Or have you been frustrated at having to undertake multiple searches to find surname variants, and have wondered why such obvious variants are not “grouped” together? Or perhaps you’ve wondered if you’ve missed entries because you don’t understand how these search engines do in fact “group” surnames. Surnames are like the other half of the DNA double helix. It’s all very well if we discover a DNA connection, but if we can’t link the two families together because we can’t find the relevant entries for our ancestors, much of our time and money is wasted. This webinar explains how online databases approach surname spellings, allowing us to maximise our use of their powerful search engines.

Names are a genealogist’s bread and butter. But how do you find your ancestors when they didn’t “go by” their proper names, or clerks mangled their names in the records or the transcriber couldn’t read the enumerator’s handwriting? These tips might help!

If you have already worked out that ‘Mc’ and ‘Mac’ surnames are the most complicated British surnames, you must listen to this webinar. And if you haven’t already worked this out, you must absolutely listen to this webinar. ‘Mc’ surnames are double the trouble because they can suffer distortions at the beginning, middle and end of the ‘Mc’ prefix as well as at the beginning, middle and end of the rest of the surname, the root word. Sound glides are a particular problem, in which the ‘k’ sound at the end of the ‘Mc’ prefix distorts the first letter of the root word (e.g. McCue/McKew/McHugh, McLachlan/McGloughlan). Transcription errors can also produce a non-‘Mc’ surname (e.g. Mackever/Markever) which can prove a trap for the unwary. This seminar will help you keep you sane when you encounter the complexities of these mad Scottish-origin surnames.

This presentation will demonstrate how to do surname searches effectively in the various Australian state and territory archives as well as the National Archives of Australia.

This presentation covers a wide range of aspects relating to Spanish surnames and Spanish surname customs.

Discover the top 10 surnames, their meaning, idiomatic structure, cognates, and geographical frequency. The list comprises the following surnames: Smith, Jones, Williams, Taylor, Davies, Brown, Wilson, Evans, Thomas, and Johnson.

This talk presents an overview of the best ways to use Y-DNA testing to research the origins of surnames in Ulster, and the best strategies for applying DNA evidence. DNA is just one form of evidence that needs to be used in tandem with other types of genealogical evidence for…

In addition to looking at the major online resources for finding surnames down under (with a bias towards Australia and a peek at New Zealand) we will visit some lesser known but very useful databases. In this presentation Jill will use, as an example, her fledgling CurryAus surname study.

Library and Archives Canada is the best website to assist in your surname study in Canada. Learn which databases can help you find the ancestors and relatives you're researching.

With increased indexing and transcription of records, often linked to digitized images on free and commercial websites, searching for an individual or collecting references to everyone holding a particular surname is much easier now, isn't it? Using a variety of sites to try to discover details about those elusive ancestors…

Discover tips and tricks to find your ancestors with common surnames and surnames that double as common words in the English language with Google. Learn how to weed out irrelevant search results to save time and get to what you want faster. Then save and automate your searches to run…