vital records

  • Ontario, Canada Digital Newspapers

    Aug 23

    No matter which region a newspaper covers, big cities or small towns, that newspaper and its articles can really provide a family researcher with the most actual view of people, events, places, occasions, etc. that are possible. Nothing better than really being there at your great grandmother’s wedding in 1893 can outshine what is found in news a...

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  • Transcribe Old Documents

    Jun 24

    As you gather the vital records, letters, diaries and journals there are a couple things you should do.  If you have the scanning equipment, do a scan of the complete document and label the image. Keep those in a computer folder for the family lineage it belongs to. You will find you want to refer back to information on that document several times...

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  • Tips When Searching for an Elusive Ancestor

    Jun 22

    Oh, we all will have one or more elusive, hard to locate ancestors in our genealogical journey. One where you might have a name and their relationship (aunt, uncle etc), but that is about it on information.  For females it can be even more problematical with just their married name and no maiden name known. So the following are a few tips or sugge...

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  • New Mexico Death Index

    Jun 2

    The family legends were that Uncle Joe moved out to the southwest portion of the United States in the 1890s and no one has heard from him since. That can be a typical tale and one that can be a long standing mystery to the family and for the genealogist. One of the areas that many individuals went to resettle in the last half of the 19th century an...

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  • Helpful Forms and Sheets

    May 3

    Organization is so important when doing your family history.  Remember you are recording and looking up about two major family branches -- your mother’s and your father’s side.  Each of those branches had two more branches, your grandparents, so now you have four major branches. If you don’t use some helpful forms and organizational sheets ...

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  • Use of a Wildcard to Search

    Apr 19

    Using the right search techniques can save you a good deal of time. Once you have done any amount of research you will see there are various spellings for given names and surnames.  Then there can even be differences in spelling of certain hometowns. Of course trying to figure dates for births-marriages and death can be quite challenging. So by...

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  • Nicknames of Our Ancestors

    Apr 4

    How frustrating when checking databases looking for a certain ancestor and you have a surname but can not locate that individual because no known given name matches.  You look over vital records and might see a couple different given names for the same person, some of which are each totally different.  You wonder if you have the right person or e...

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  • My First Find on the 1940 Census

    Apr 3

    It was 9 a.m. on Monday morning, April 2nd along the east coast and I started by searching on the newly released 1940 US Federal Census on Ancestry.com.  The only locations with images available at that point in time on the first day were nine states (California, Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia)....

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  • 1940 Census Day Has Arrived

    Apr 2

    The time has arrived, what every family history researcher has been waiting for -- the April 1940 U. S. Federal Census, available today at 9 a.m.  Of course that does not mean you can click on any database now to find your ancestors in 1940. View this short 3 minute video supplied by the National Census Archives, holders of the census, to bette...

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  • Mobile Changes for Ancestry.com

    Mar 26

    With the rapid advancements in communication methods, the fee-based subscription database of Ancestry.com is keeping up in the latest technical devices that people are using today.  It now has available a mobile app (application) for use with the iPad, iPhone and Android tablets and phones. The new enhanced version has the universal support for...

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