When I moved from Mexico to the United States with my family as a teenager, my last name quickly became a recurring issue in administrative settings. Very often, offices would file documents under my second last name, confusing my first last name for a middle name. I..
Continue readingMy great-grandmother Kathleen never spoke much about her childhood, but she always wondered what happened to her little brother Joe.
Continue reading →Some obituaries provide little to no information aside from the deceased individual’s age and death location—but others can be invaluable sources for learning more about a person’s life and family.
Many of the..
Continue reading →Not too long ago, I shared my experience of joining American Ancestors’ recent Scottish Heritage Tour. In that post I briefly introduced you to an intriguing ancestor of mine—John Lynch Breslin, Jr., who was imprisoned for attempted arson. Today I want to discuss how I..
Continue reading →Family history research gives us an opportunity to learn more about our ancestors’ experiences in their..
Continue reading →You could be 10, 43, or 85. You could be a beginner or an expert. But if you love genealogy as much as I do, you know how special a visit to the headquarters of New England Historic Genealogical Society..
Continue reading →My interest in genealogy sprouted at an early age, when my father would tell me stories he heard as a child about my great-great-grandfather, Christopher McNanny. He recounted that Christopher served as a drummer boy during the Civil War, and endured the amputation of..
Continue reading →“They said she was the daughter of a slave.”
“Wait a minute, Papi!”
I was on the phone with my father, talking about connections to relatives we had discovered through our Ancestry DNA testing. My..
Continue reading →A recent series of posts on lodgers who are possibly relatives hit close to home in my search for information about my wife's great-grandfather. In three consecutive Scotland census reports he is listed first as boarder, then as son, and finally lodger. It took some..
Continue reading →Death certificates can add depth to a family tree, but when the parent names for the deceased are documented incorrectly, it can lead research down the wrong path—especially..
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