In your family history budget or list of gifts, have you eliminated society memberships as a way to cut costs?  You should reconsider.  Society memberships are some of the best deals on the planet!  You don’t live near the society to take advantage of the things they offer!  Here’s a sampling of member benefits that [...]

Things have changed since the days when we sat around the nightly dinner table and had a discussion.  Parents and children are busy.  In our hurried lives, many have the grab and go routine down where they drive through the fast food line, grab their grub, chow it down, and head to the next activity [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Can you imagine finding an entry in a county history that gives tons of biographical information on your ancestor?  It’s possible! I found the following entry in the History of Jones County, Iowa.  It reads: “BENJAMIN CHAPLIN, farmer, Sec. 35; P.O. Anamosa; was born in Cortland Co., N. Y., in 1816; his father’s family removed [...]