Using Homestead Records to Tell Your Ancestor’s Story

Minna and Ada Everleigh, Chicago’s most famous pair of sisters, fabricated many details of their lives in order to run their shady business. Learn to sort fact from fiction.

After years of using census records, genealogists may take for granted that they're using them fully and correctly. But as they learn about genealogy standards and best practices, do they go back and re-think their census practices? What does it even mean to evaluate a census record? Let's learn a bit more about the U.S. census and the specific ways that standards can help us to maximize its usefulness.

From the beginning of European settlement in North America, free and inexpensive land has been a tool for enticing settlers to migrate to new areas. The English and Spanish granted large tracts to individuals in return for bringing new people into areas with sparse European populations. Bounty land was granted to soldiers in America’s early wars. The end of the American Revolution led to a number of Federal plans to sell or grant vast acreages of public domain land. Homesteading opportunities attracted Americans and immigrants to the west after the Civil War. The availability of affordable land was a catalyst for the migration of many of our ancestors.

Research on a man's mysterious second marriage identified his wife as a romance scammer who preyed on Civil War veterans. This case study shows how evidence correlation and reasonably exhaustive research cut through the lies and misdirection in a woman's records to establish her identity and reveal her sometimes deadly deception.

Many immigrants entered the US under the Displaced Persons Act. Based on specific criteria, eligible displaced persons (DPs) could be admitted to the US if they would not become a public charge and have safe and sanitary housing and employment without displacing some other person. The displaced person or refugee was the concern of the International Refugee Organization. The US created the Displaced Persons Commission to oversee the act’s enactment. Is your ancestor named in the record sets created? The presentation will discuss the History of the Act and the records created as a result of the Act.

A one place study explores an ancestral place in depth by studying the history, the environment, and the people of a place over time. Learn practical strategies for conducting your own OPS and how it helps you meet the Genealogy Standards. See how the assembled information can add rich context to your ancestors' lives, fill gaps where records are lacking, and uncover forgotten connections within a community.

To correlate evidence, you must have evidence to correlate. Typical researchers stop too soon in their evidence collection, believing they have found all there is to find about a soldier. There is more to military research than the compiled military service record or the pension application file. A reasonably exhaustive search is not limited to the two or three typical record sources.

The laws our ancestors lived by can tell us much about life in earlier times. Finding those laws, and the stories they tell, can be a daunting task, but—from colonial statutes to today, from the halls of Congress to the statehouses of 50 states—the choices legislators made about what laws were needed give a rich and deep context to family history.

In 1906, Nellie Langevin married Frank Henry Hill in Penacook, New Hampshire. Frank vanished three years later, leaving Nellie to fend for herself. Despite her efforts to divorce him, Nellie died in 1914, still officially married. Who was Nellie’s elusive husband and what happened to him? This case study resolves conflicting direct, indirect, and negative evidence to uncover Frank’s identity and highlights the importance of including the FAN Club in reasonably exhaustive research.