Hope our US readers had a good Thanksgiving! Once Thanksgiving is over, most people turn their thoughts to the next holiday. And there are bunches in the next few weeks, Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa among others. So what does this have to do with family history? Obviously there are many traditions, like the cookies we talked about last year.
Tag: genealogy research Page 1 of 2
Posts about researching family history
When you are doing family research, it can be tricky to track all of the relationships. I thought it might be helpful to explain what some of the relationship descriptors actually mean. My software helps me sort it all out, but it’s not too complicated if you know where to start.
Last week, I posted about finding that a large number of relatives were from a smallish area in Germany. I had some requests from people who wanted to know where their relatives were from. So here are some tips you can use to try to find out.
When we were working on last week’s post about Henry and Anna Vonderhaar, I was interested to note that their parents had all immigrated at about the same time. I started looking at where they were from and discovered it was very likely they knew each other before they moved to Iowa. They were all from the area near Ankum, Germany.
I’ve talked in a couple of previous posts about the challenges of keeping track of all the information and the photographs that we have for our family history. My post about the photographs covered the digital side of organizing. Now we needed to come up with a storage and organizing solution for the actual photographs.
I had originally planned to write about the anniversary of one of Walt’s great-great aunts, Rhoda Hole. Our information had her marrying John Christy on January 13, 1861. But it turned out not to be the case.
The family information we had told us that she was John Swisher Hole’s younger sister, born in 1846. The notes also mentioned that she had been married twice, the second time to someone with the last name of Monroe, but that was all the information we had.
You most likely noticed that there have been a bunch of documents showing up on the blog lately – census reports, marriage certificates and the like. We have a temporary subscription to Ancestry© and I have been using it to gather information. Using an online genealogy service like Ancestry© has the potential to provide huge amounts of information. They have family trees, census records, marriage records and other resources located in one place.