Researching Your Oregon Ancestors

The Oregon Trail extended approximately 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon from 1840 to 1869. More than 50,000 people traveled to Oregon and a great number died on the journey. This talk will cover resources for conducting research on the people and their lives along the trail.

While many 17th-century Connecticut colonists have been researched and written about, there remain research challenges: distinguishing people with the same name, deciphering hard-to-read handwriting, understanding unique record sets, and more. This class examines the beginnings of Connecticut, New Haven, and Saybrook Colonies and the people who inhabited the lands prior to colonization. The class reviews published genealogical resources and record transcriptions and then presents strategies to locate and utilize primary sources. The webinar concludes with tips on overcoming common research challenges.

As a major center of American history and starting point for westward migration, Philadelphia has much more to offer genealogists than just tourist sites. The greater Philadelphia area is home to a variety of underrated libraries and archives that should not be missed by serious family historians.

What are the secrets to finding New England vital records today? If you understand how they were made, and all the things that have happened to them since, you will bring new skills and insight to your vital records research. Also, let's develop some strategies for those times when the record cannot be found.

Kentucky and Virginia have some of the most complete tax lists in the United States. Their value in research often goes unrecognized by even the experienced researcher. Tax lists can be a primary tool for solving difficult research problems and are invaluable when used with other records. Learn how to access original records, to best organize them for study, and to interpret their meaning. The lecture will use case studies to show their use in tracking individuals across time, estimating birth dates and death dates, separating individuals of the same name, determining the identity of other family members, and using them as substitutes for deeds, court records, and estate records in burned counties.

Researching Puerto Rican ancestors is a unique experience, requiring a knowledge of both Latin American and North American record types and strategies. We'll talk basics about finding your hometown and what records can help you trace your ancestry on both sides of the sea.

If you have any American heritage at all, chances are, you have at least one person in your family tree who lived at some point in New York City. Join Mike Mansfield, Director of Content Operations at MyHeritage, as he dives into a world of rich resources for researching ancestors who called the Big Apple home.

Family lore tells a different story than the records for the paternity of a southwest Virginia great-grandfather. Learn how DNA helps solve the mystery!

This lecture illustrates the joys and pitfalls of Virginia research as well as a employing a problem-solving approach utilizing social history, female research, and family analysis to identify the parents of Elizabeth Stith, the ancestor "from nowhere." One need not have Virginia ancestors to see the Genealogical Proof Standard at work!