Have you heard of the Blue-Eyed Indians that wrecked havoc in Schoharie County, New York during the Revolutionary War?  They weren’t really Indians.  Sympathetic to the Tory cause, they were brothers united to stir up trouble against the American Patriots. They were my family.  (Guess that explains the rebel in me).  You can read more [...]

If all you have about an ancestor are his vital statistics, his name, birth, marriage, and death, you only have a skeleton and skeletons are not much fun to look at.  In fact, they’re kind of scary.   If you only have the bare bones about your ancestor, that’s kind of scary, too, because how do [...]

“’Twas a dark and stormy night when my Nellie went away. I’ll never forget to my dying day.  She was just 16, the village queen, …” (“Little Nell,” from old vaudeville). Many of you have stories of ancestors who have disappeared in the night, like the daughter of an earl who fell in love with [...]

You’ve searched your ancestor’s life from the time he was born to the days he died and was buried.  Think you might be done researching him?  Maybe not! Some records may be created or recorded long after a person died! Land records may have been handed down for generations before the original documents were recorded.  [...]

Do your ancestors give you angst when you cannot find them or their family?  Mine do.  I love the words to a song from the musical, “Paint Your Wagon.”  It goes, “I talk to the trees, but they don’t listen to me.  I talk to the stars, but they never hear me.  The breeze hasn’t [...]

Many people are descended from John Billington, a signer of the Mayflower Compact, who was convicted of murdering another man and suffered death by hanging at Plymouth, Massachusetts.   Billington was the first in New England to take another man’s life. Many have tripped down this same path, some against their own family members. In a [...]

I’ve given you lot of different places to look for information about your ancestors.   Some people may think that once they’ve found the basics on a person, that’s enough.  It’s not.  Why should you want the details? Let me give you an example.  John Pliny Crysler lived in Williamsburg, Ontario in the early 1800s.  I [...]

If you had a birth record for a child that gives the date and place of birth and his parents’ names, would that be enough?  Would you stop there or would you look for other records?  I hope you said you’d look for other records and sources. If you had a birth record AND a [...]

Family rumor says that your Grandpa’s brother, Jack, robbed a bank and he served time for it,  or, maybe in your research you discovered one of those skeletons in your closet, the one with “thief” written across his forehead.  Sometimes our ancestors lived their whole lives without creating a single document that identifies them.  Other [...]

Some of you may have traced your genealogy back to someone involved in the Salem Witch Trials.  We may never know what really happened and what motivated certain accusations, but in light of recent studies, it may have been a very different story. It is to our benefit that we are able to look back [...]