The Genealogy in Government Documents

This presentation will suggest strategies to correlate large amounts of information often developed in urban research, with a significant emphasis on the use of cartographic resources. Generally, researchers of urban settings have an abundance of sources to consider. Many times, the challenge is to connect and analyze multiple, even overwhelming, amounts of information. A variety of resources will be discussed, especially, cadastral maps (land ownership), Sanborn fire insurance maps and city directories.

When the United States acquired land that had been under the governance of foreign nations (Great Britain, France, Spain, and Mexico), the U.S. government agreed to grant title to landowners who could prove prior legal land rights from those foreign governments. This webinar shows how to access and use records…

Appling the principles of reasonably exhaustive research, the project demonstrates both the process to document the life of a nineteenth century German immigrant from her ancestral village to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania and illustrates how this women, who was a single parent most of her life, employed her strong entrepreneurial spirt…

With the ever expanding digital resources available today we can find evidence of kinship in military records often neglected. Records such as pensions, service records, medical records, and even pension payment records are increasingly available. However, our need to ensure that we conduct 'reasonably exhaustive research' required by the Genealogical…

It’s hard to do genealogy well without studying your ancestors’ Friends & Family, Associates, and Neighbors - their FAN club. If your ancestors are Irish, you might have no luck at all without those FAN principles. But if you combine FAN club research with DNA, you might have just the winning ticket to get you back to your Irish ancestor’s origins. In this case study presentation, learn how focused research pointed the way from Ohio to townlands in County Mayo for an 1850s-era Irish immigrant.

Research reports are not just for professionals, but are a great tool for anyone who wants to answer their research questions. Write a research report to yourself to organize your thoughts, analyze the evidence, document your findings, and solve your puzzles. Using an example from the Netherlands, this presentation demonstrates how you can organize a research report to spot more clues in records, discover and resolve discrepancies, and build reliable conclusions.

Is it logical that a woman born in 1752 gave birth to a son in 1848? Do I have enough evidence to conclude that Johan Kannon of Trondheim, Norway, was the same person as John Connell from Cut-and-Shoot, Texas? Why do I share 300 cM of DNA with three people I’ve never heard of? Genealogists make hundreds of decisions everyday based on thousands of pieces of information harvested from various sources. We automatically, and often unconsciously, use common sense, logic, and even intuition, to identify relevant evidence, problem-solve, and answer complex questions. Learning to harness the power of logic, syllogism, and our own “Spidey-senses,” can help scale brick-walls, solve DNA mysteries, and organize mountains of information. This talk focuses on how to incorporate logic, common sense, and critical thinking in a more deliberate way to create hypotheses, test theories, and support conclusions. Johnson will share exercises that can bulk up logic and critical thought muscles, as well as practical tips on how to apply common sense and sensibility to your family history research and writing.

In the summer of 2023 American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society announced the collaborative 10 Million Names project, an undertaking to recover the names of people of African descent who were enslaved in the area of the United States. This monumental task of centralizing datasets about African Americans is likely to take years to accomplish; in the interim, this webinar provides a useful survey of the many existing databases that serve a similar purpose though limited in scope.

Family tradition holds that John H. Hickey of Rockton, Winnebago County, Illinois, disappeared. This case study proves John "disappeared" and establishes the missing man's fate. A patchwork of records allowed a glimpse into the life of a person thought dead.