One year Bruce and I traveled to Ireland for genealogy research.  We spent a day in Dublin, then headed west to County Galway.  My second-great grandmother, Sarah Mullin, was from Tuam.  Once in America, she married Thomas Francis Farrell, a tailor, son of Michael Farrell.  His naturalization papers say he is from County Galway, but [...]

Would you like to make Christmas less commercial, and more meaningful this year?  How about including some family history items in your gift list.  You probably don’t have time to make a family quilt or some other big project, but there are some things you can give or do to make this year a Family [...]

One summer Bruce and I traveled to England.  After researching for a few days in London, we rented a car and drove up the countryside to a hotel about an hour east of Liverpool.  (We learned long ago that to protect our sanity and our marriage, we wouldn’t drive in the big cities). The next [...]

This subject should be of interest to just about everybody tracing their family tree in the U.S., because frankly, most of us descend from at least one immigrant. Even the Spanish were immigrants.   When you’re trying to find the place of your ancestor’s origin, there are several source types you should search: Census Records:  Census [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Did your ancestor live in the wild west or the California gold country and you cannot find the town on a current map? It might be a ghost town but there is hope for you to still find the records from that town. There are three types of ghost towns today: 1.  The town may [...]

If you think economic times are hard now, think about what your ancestors had to live through! Let me give you three examples: 1.  “The Summer That Never Was,” 1816, may have been caused by an Indonesian volcano that erupted April 1815 spewing 100 miles of cubic ash and dust into the atmosphere.  During the [...]

Have you found a skeleton in your closet, some deep secret that the family never talked about or never new about?  I have. I have found more than one, but I’ll tell you about one.  In compiling a family history I discovered one lady had been married previous to her current husband but no one [...]

Have you looked for a death record and couldn’t find it, maybe because vital registration didn’t exist for that period of time, so you gave up?  There’s more than one way to skin a cat!  I’ve found records of deaths in probate records, obituaries, cemetery records, and even a state gazetteer! Trust me, you will [...]