Genealogy

I’ve always enjoyed giving presentations. Speaking for an audience isn’t just the speaking. It is the ritual. First there is the planning of the drive. When should one leave to miss rush hour traffic in just the right way. Leave too soon and the resulting smooth sailing will get you there ridiculously early. Leave too […]

(Title with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez, author of Love in the Time of Cholera) Sometimes when we research, we forget that the family-scale events that we are researching, like births, marriages, deaths, and migrations, played out against a background of events that ran from local to global. It is as if we imagine that

More than 160 years ago, a young mother gave birth to a daughter. The birth record gave a rough idea of where the family lived, but no more. More than 160 years ago, a young mother-to-be checked into a maternity clinic.  The journals still exist. I’ve never used one before, but you never know what

There is a story, apparently first told about 1800, that kippers could be used to throw hounds off the scent. Kippers are a sort of preserved herring. The preservation process can turn the fish reddish. An idiom was born. In genealogy we often deal with things we think of as facts. Often the fact is

Sometimes when people are getting started in genealogy, they don’t think about the possibility that relatives can turn up in places where they aren’t expected. One very famous American lady was an immigrant from France, born in the 1880s. My family recently paid a visit to her slightly younger sister, who still lives in Paris. The family

I’m always skeptical of connections to the famous, the powerful, and the high-born, but a current project in Tudor England is starting to smell suspicious. The family name matches the name of a village. In that village lived a noble family of the same name. In the parish church remains of this family include medieval

Mother’s Day has passed and Father’s Day will soon be upon us. Though we don’t tend to think of parents as ancestors, technically they are. How far back does a person need to be to be thought of as an ancestor? Grandparent does not seem far enough back. If Mother’s Day and Father’s Day exist

Spring is here and with it, the time for spring cleaning. No one really knows the origin of the tradition. It might be purely practical. In March and April in Europe and North America, there tends to be a time when it is warm enough to really open up the house and get the dust

You’ve probably heard that sometimes things don’t work out the way you want. That is true in general, and it is certainly true in genealogy. If we want to know what really happened, then one skill that genealogists need to develop is the handling of disappointment. The last few days I’ve been trying to find