It’s an exciting time to research your genealogy. These days records and information from around the world can often be quickly accessed online with a few strokes of a keyboard. Major subscription databases like MyHeritage, which has well over 6 billion historical records so far, are actively growing their online records collections. FamilySearch continues to put more and more Family History Library microfilms online and recently released a new collection of 4.2 million images of civil … [Read more...]
The Importance of Oral Histories
I recently had the privilege of attending the Foundation for East European Family History Studies (FEEFHS) Conference in Salt Lake City. While there were many helpful courses, the one that stood out to me most was an oral history class presented by Ina Navazelskis, a journalist of 30 years and a current interviewer for the United States Holocaust Museum’s Oral History Branch.Ms. Navazelskis taught us that oral histories are a spoken resource. While this may seem obvious, I was struck with … [Read more...]
11 Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Family Biographies
Recently, we published a post on tips for writing a family biography that others would want to read. Perhaps that article inspired you to begin your own, or to dig up an unfinished manuscript and take a closer look. Maybe you’ve got the organization part figured out, but your writing itself needs some polishing.At Legacy Tree Genealogists, we have a lot of experience writing – not just on the part of our researchers, but also by our project managers and editors, who look over each report and … [Read more...]
Bridging the Gap: Writing a Family Biography Others Will Want to Read
Sometimes as genealogists we get so caught up in collecting all the details about our ancestors that we forget the other important side of family history – sharing it with family members! If you have a closet overflowing with old documents or a database full of facts, and you decide you'd like to share what you've learned with others, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.It can also be confusing to find the best way to share the information you’ve spent so much time gathering. If … [Read more...]
Do Family Legends Have a Place in Genealogical Research?
Every family has a storyteller or two – an uncle who brings out the same old stories at every family dinner or a great-grandma who shares cherished memories of her childhood with her grandchildren. The best stories, of course, are the ones that are passed down from generation to generation: reverent retellings of an ancestor’s importance in his community, a connection to somebody or something famous, or the mischievous deeds of the ancestral black sheep.These stories are fun and fascinating … [Read more...]
Tragedy and the Importance of Historical Context
In doing genealogical research, it’s extremely important to look beyond the bare-bones names and dates of your ancestors, and learn about the culture, history, and events that took place during their lives. If we neglect this vital piece of the puzzle, there will often be crucial elements to our ancestors’ story that we will miss. The tragic story of the Bruse family is a lesson in this principle.In June of 1870, August Bruse and his wife Sophia lived with their five children, ages seven to … [Read more...]
It’s a Small Genealogy World
As professional genealogists, we help people learn about and connect with their ancestors every day. But did you know that we also help people connect with living relatives?One case we worked on involved a family of eleven children who were split up after a tragedy in the early 1900s. The children of the youngest daughter, only a toddler at the time, had grown up never knowing they had a large extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins. We were able to trace almost all of … [Read more...]
Biological vs. Cultural Heritage
Genealogy is full of surprises. As I was wrapping up a large pedigree project for one of our clients recently, a couple of birth records that had been lost in the mail finally arrived. They revealed that the man the client had always known as her paternal grandfather was not actually biologically connected to her family after all.Now that DNA testing is affordable and available to everyone, these genealogy surprises (called non-paternity events) are becoming more and more common. Of course, … [Read more...]
Walking in Their Footsteps: Italy
One of my favorite things about being a Project Manager for Legacy Tree Genealogists is witnessing how our work directly affects our clients.We recently wrapped up a project for a client who will soon be traveling to Italy. After tracing her Italian immigrant ancestors through the United States Federal Census records in the early 20th Century, we were able to identify an arrival in the U.S. in ships manifest records. Not only did this clear up a family rumor that their eldest living son was … [Read more...]
