A Family Tapestry

  The connections we can gain from DNA testing gift us with the ability to reach out to strangers and meet them as family. This weekend, I h...

  This month began by listing what I had already learned about my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, Lyman Jackson , in preparati...

  It's been two weeks now since I've begun adding descendants to my mother-in-law's family tree from the line of her fourth grea...

  When it comes to researching our family's history, each of us knows a little something about our ancestors that another cousin might n...

  I once was acquainted with a woman who had married her third cousin. While it may be unusual for the general public to even understand wha...

  What is that saying about good things coming in threes? This third month of 2026 may have been filled with lots of family history discover...

  Family history can sometimes seem like a solitary pursuit: the lone researcher, sequestered in her office or musty archive, poring over do...

  There is nothing that can put the brakes on genealogical progress like entering into hitherto unexplored regions. For me, that unexplored ...

  When struggling to find information on a brick wall ancestor, I turn aside to the mystery ancestor's collateral lines. In that way, I ...

  It may seem odd to watch someone research the family history of the grandchildren of a second great-grandmother's brother, but this I ...

  It's interesting how one successful find in our deep ancestry creates a desire to find more of the same. Finding Joseph Howard's w...

  It's been a long time since I last attended an in-person genealogy conference, but when I recently discovered the title of one book pu...

  There is a lot which can be learned about genealogical research by reading about marketing techniques. I already realized that, but I don...

  With a smile—and perhaps a twinkle of the eye—some researchers talk about "cousin bait" when they discuss strategy for working o...

  Out of the blue last week, I got an email from a distant cousin. This was a cousin whom I only met online due to our DNA match at Ancestry...

  The last couple weeks have brought me some surprises: distant cousins finding me via this blog and wanting to talk Tilsons. Yep, cousin ba...

Most people are death on the wholesale copying of online family trees—and I get that. There is no sense perpetuating erroneous material. As...

The one good thing about maintaining a genealogy blog is that it can attract interested cousins. "Cousin bait," we call it among ...

Sometimes, it seems like I write and write for years , then...nothing from any inquiring cousins. Somehow, I get so used to the silence tha...

In an era now, in which genetic genealogists bemoan the lack of responses from their own DNA matches, it may be hard to believe that only a...