Ancestral Findings

There is a moment in almost every genealogy project when temptation shows up. It does not usually sound reckless. It sounds reasonable. It sounds efficient. It often arrives as one simple sentence, "T...

19 Tammi 7min

Coming Back to the Paper Trail Last time, we stood inside a gap, ten years of a man's life with no clear paper trail. No neat answers. No satisfying explanation. Just silence, the kind that shows up i...

16 Tammi 4min

There are times in genealogy when the records speak clearly. Names line up, dates behave, and places make sense. You can follow a life forward with little resistance. Then there are times when the tra...

14 Tammi 6min

Genealogy has ruined me in the best way. I can be perfectly content all day, and then I see a hint, a record index, a cemetery photo, or a single line in a probate packet, and my brain flips a switch....

12 Tammi 11min

Federal homestead records sit in a sweet spot between law and lived experience. They were created to document a legal transfer of public land into private hands, yet they often preserve day-to-day det...

9 Tammi 10min

When you first start researching your family, it is easy to believe every question has a record waiting somewhere. A birth certificate, a marriage entry, a census line, a grave marker, a neat little d...

7 Tammi 9min

Marriage records are one of the three core types of vital records every family historian should learn to use. Birth, marriage, and death records often work together like a three legged stool. If you a...

5 Tammi 8min

January is basically the genealogist's secret power month. The holidays are over, the calendar is wide open, and you can finally hear yourself think. While winter does its quiet thing outside, you get...

1 Tammi 8min