Continuing with the parts of a deed from my last post:

Warranty: “…to warrant & forever confirm the same unto him the said Josiah Lichfield his heirs & assigns from & against all the lawful claims and demands of all persons whatsoever.” (Types of deeds will be..

Tracing the origins of Canadian ancestors can be difficult, and the lack of early vital records can prove frustrating. Often, we have to turn to other sources to help piece together family..

For the last several months, I have been trying to determine the origins of each of my mother’s Irish ancestors. In a previous post, I mentioned my success in locating the origins of my Kenefick ancestors; however, I have been having trouble with some ancestors with..

Deed formats and terminology vary from colony to colony, county to county, time period to time period and from the handwriting and style of one clerk to another, all of which makes this a complex topic. As a basic primer, we are using a..

A couple of weeks ago I was working on an article for The Root, the online magazine, about locating World War I service records for a reader’s Mississippi ancestors. Knowing that the original service records are not..

In my recent lectures on DNA, I have discussed the nature of X chromosome inheritance. Owing to the fact that males inherit Y chromosomes from their fathers (who received it only from their fathers,..

In my last Vita Brevis post, I wrote about some of the best sources to help identify your Loyalist ancestors. But before the Loyalists fled to Canada after the American Revolution, another important group settled Maritime Canada:..

Readers have asked how to cite Internet sources. Confession, I don’t really know the answer – and I don’t think many others do, either. It is a new, still-evolving discipline complicated by the transitory nature of the beast, where links to pages get changed and/or..

I received a phone call the other day from my parents as they were driving through Kansas on a road trip. They wanted to tell me about a curious roadside advertisement they had seen that they thought would interest me: the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia,..

Riffing on something Chris Child wrote about collecting photos of family members in July, I thought I might do something similar with information about family burial plots. Such an exercise leans heavily on Findagrave.com (where some of the images may be found),..