Categotry Archives: General
Tech Tuesday – Family Tree DNA Research
A current news story involves the use of DNA collected and analyzed for genealogical use, being utilized to track down a suspect from a 1991 Seattle murder case. In December of 1991, 16-year-old Sarah Yarborough was killed at her high school in Washington state. The suspect in the case has remained nothing other than a police sketch to this point and the case has been cold for twenty years now. Last month however, forensic scientists ran the suspects DNA against those [...]
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Family Tree Research Interest
Genealogy and researching family trees has become quite popular. Why the interest in tracing ancestral lines? This was not necessarily a popular hobby in the past. This can be seen by how difficult it can often be to track down your ancestors. Vital records were not kept formally by the government until recently and it is not altogether normal to find family trees all put together and complete from 100 or 200 years ago. Why then, has genealogy become so [...]
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Census Records
A great resource for family tree researchers are census records. In the United States, we can access census records in some areas as far back as 1790 and currently as late as 1930. Census records remain sealed to the public for 72 years after they are taken. While early census records will often fail to provide too much information and often not even the names of anyone except the head of the household, later census records can provide a wealth of [...]
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Very Little Information
I recently did family tree research for someone who have very little information to start with. Her recently deceased mother had gone by many different names over time, had moved many times to multiple states, and had little to no communication with her family. She knew nothing about her mother’s side of the family and wasn’t even sure what her mother’s legal name was. With this sort of information to start off with, researching a family tree can seem like [...]
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Tech Tuesday – To Share Or Not To Share
In researching your family tree, most people will come to a point where geographic location or a lack of digitized resources available online has your research at a standstill. To make a sweeping generalization, for the most part, our families rarely stayed in one place their whole lives and the chances that we, as family tree researchers, now live in those towns is slim. We live all over the world and do most of our research utilizing resources available online. The digitization [...]
