Most of us have research that is ten or twenty years old! We stopped because the answer just wasn’t within our grasp and the answer to “where do I look next?” wasn’t obvious. Maybe it is time to look again. Not only are there countless online databases that (for a fee) provide amazing arrays of …

After explosive growth the last five years, genealogical databases have settled in and now derive their best returns from developing their collections. One of the key sources that meet many tricky chronology tests of the Genealogical Proof Standard is the newspaper article that nails the date, year, or place of an event. Faced with a …

Every season has its compelling conferences—from Winter’s RootsTech in Salt Lake City, to Spring’s National Genealogical Society, and Summer’s Federation of Genealogical Societies conferences in various cities, and Fall’s New York State Family History Conference in Syracuse, N.Y. Choosing which ones to attend will probably have more to do with location than anything else since …

2016 is a Leap Year and the news is full of people who are turning 100 after celebrating only twenty-five actual birthdays. The passage of time has been measured in many ways and genealogists must adapt and account for traditions, scientific adjustments, and perceptual ways of measuring people’s ages. For instance, before about 1800, most …

Last year teacher Emily Phillips died and the obituary she wrote for herself went viral (Ed Mazza, “A Teacher Writes Her Own Obituary,” Huffington Post, 3 April 2015). A lot of people thought it was a terrific idea and anyone who read it has to agree. Among the classic lines it contained, “I was born, …