A Family Tapestry

  Working our way through the lines descending from my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter, one detail is apparent: he had a lot of daughte...

  When it comes to researching distant ancestors with umpteen children, grandchildren, and beyond through five generations, it takes a team ...

  Sometimes, in pursuing information on our brick wall ancestor, we can end up with too much information. That may be the case with my seco...

  How can handwriting be so perfectly clear, and yet not communicate the information we need? That's what had me stuck last week as I pu...

  Brick wall ancestors demand a relentless push to find additional records in the hope that perhaps finding just one more, we'll receive...

  Sometimes, ya just gotta build it yourself. Since I've been stuck on the origin of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe, I won...

  Family trees can do mysterious things to the identity of our ancestors. Perhaps an ancestor has acquired a false identity, as I'm begi...

  Today is the start of RootsTech , so you can hardly expect me to focus on my own research when there are so many presentations to watch on...

  Having made a list of all the records where I found mention of my second great-grandfather, it's time to check it again. Whether the m...

  Sometimes, those family stories are just that: stories. We can't, however, simply dismiss them out of hand. As with so many such insta...

  If one of the guiding principles of genealogy is to start with what you know, then when we find ourselves stuck, perhaps the corollary sho...

Some months, my research candidate for my Twelve Most Wanted brings me lots of work—and, if I'm fortunate, plenty of new DNA cousins in ...

  The trouble with planning research goals months in advance is that, once the time arrives to do so, we can't just magically pull a gen...

  It's wrap up week for goal number one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, and I haven't found much to write about. The end of...

  There are several details about a family's history which may be available to those who know how to search through publicly-available r...

  Finding DNA matches may be fun for some—hence those now-antiquated Ancestry.com ads about trading one's lederhosen for a kilt —but I h...

  It sometimes feels as if the family history pursuit is a chase that leads in circles. In this month's goal to determine exactly which ...

  It is sometimes hard to support conjectures about the details we spot in ancestors' records. For William Laws—a man I don't yet  h...

  Sometimes, when the seemingly never-ending list of children in the household grows to unbelievable extents, it might be just that: unbelie...

  There is one less-obvious column in the United States enumerations for the mid to late 1800s for which I've been grateful as I pore ov...