Jan 11
The State of Washington has a very complete series of databases for researchers to use. Viewing the homepage note all the listings on the left side. There are records referring to military, census, land, court, licenses, cemeteries, institutions and so many more. Some of the most popular are the birth, marriage, death, nationalizations and photogra...
Jan 3
There it was all around, no escaping the newspaper headlines, the talk on the neighborhood corner or family dinners at the table. It was the early fall season of 1918 and not a tremendous amount to be very cheerful about by citizens across America. The nation had been “over there”, in Europe fighting the Germans since the United States declar...
Dec 30
In a past FamilyTree.com Genealogical Blog, I had written about cruise lines, railroad and airlines menus and locating them online in a digital format. The New York Public Library has an even greater collection of menus from restaurants, hotels, banquet rooms all over New York and other locations – also in digital format. It is the Miss F...
Dec 28
Those researchers with ancestral veterans who served during the American Civil War will want to find as many additional sources of primary information as possible. One good location is the pension applications and case files completed by the widows and dependent children of veterans. The United States government granted pensions to widows of men...
Dec 24
A perfect opportunity to identify photos in family albums is during the holiday week when you can visit with relatives. Never attempt to label all the photos, but even a handful will help you later in some additional research. If you are going to a relative's house and they don't have any family photos and you do, bring them along. Share them with ...
Dec 22
The San Francisco, California Public Library has online a large historical photographic collection of the city by the bay. These images starting around 1850 come from cabinet cards, lantern slides, photo albums, postcards, panorama, glass negatives, stereograph and general scenes of San Francisco and California subjects. There are about 40,000 of t...
Dec 20
The search engine on the Internet is a valuable tool. One of the most well-known and innovated search engines is Google. It can be extremely useful for family history research. Their newspaper collections are outstanding. Since newspaper, big and small circulation are the window to a community, the use of newspaper articles for family research has ...
Dec 16
There are collections of all types of items – just about any time period and any location. This includes menus. Yes, the card stock folder, the sheet of paper or the booklet – many different type of food menus used by airlines and cruise ships. This online collection from Northwestern University Library has about 400 menus from across the Uni...
Dec 14
FamilySearch.org has collected some 40,000 digital family history books along with periodicals and gazettes all relating to genealogy and individual family research. This makes it very simple to locate, read and even download the material if you desire. The seven sources for this collection range from the Allen County Public Library, to Brigham ...
Dec 10
The sending and receiving of postcards became a very popular activity for people around the globe beginning in the 1870s and especially by the late 1880s and into the 1910s. The postcards were not just sent while one was traveling, visiting other places, but also just as a method to share scenes of what their own hometown or region looked like. Ph...