Monthly Archive: June, 2020

Fitting Family History into Your Life

Question: How do you squeeze a huge object (family history) into a small box (your free time to work on it)? Answer: In small pieces. As explained in the 15 Minutes page of The Family History Guide, you can accomplish some amazing things with your family history by approaching it in segments of 15 minutes or more. In the “Fitting...

How Social Media and Family History Brought a Family Together

It is quite amazing to think about how far we have come with technology. Since the creation of the Internet, there have been many changes in the way we shop, research, communicate, and even in how we do family history. More particularly, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, have made it easier to write and share content...

Languages, Scripts, and Genealogy

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner was published previously on the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. The United States is a nation of immigrants. About 1.6% of the population are Native Americans. If we persist in doing genealogical research we will all find ourselves trying to read difficult to decipher handwriting and nearly...

A Gift from My Dad

It’s early on a Saturday morning in Southern California, in the late 1960’s. The aroma of fresh waffles is already starting to fill the house as I peek into the kitchen. My brother’s baseball card collection covers  about half the table (and Mom will make him clean it up before breakfast). I can already guess where Dad is: he’s probably...

MyHeritage’s New Photo Enhancement Feature

Once again, MyHeritage has recently announced a new feature that continues to make photographs come to life. This new feature allows people to take their old photographs of their ancestors and enhance them. Essentially, the feature ‘cleans’ the photo from static and aging in a way that makes the pictures look like they came out brand new. Combined with their...

Where was the event? Where are the records?

Editor’s Note: This article by James Tanner appeared previously in the Genealogy’s Star blog site and is used with the author’s permission. The questions in the title of this post are two separate but closely related issues. To start, I will repeat a general guideline for all genealogical researchers: The place of an event in an ancestor’s or relative’s life...

New in The Family History Guide: Link Titles

If you have spent some time looking through the Country and Ethnic pages in The Family History Guide, you’ll realize that there is a lot of great material there. There are thousands of links to articles, videos, websites, and research databases, organized by Goals and Choices. Several months ago we added a number of intermediate headings in Choices. These split...

How to Read an Old Document

How to read an old document Genealogists who are involved in doing their own original research inevitably run into handwritten documents that are difficult to decipher. The difficulty arises from a number of factors: the document is written in a language unknown to the researcher the creator of the document had poor handwriting skills the document is written in a...

Indexing in Other Languages: An Ever-Growing Need

A few days ago, my wife decided to do some indexing via FamilySearch while I was messaging my grandmother. As we were talking, I mentioned that my wife was indexing, and my grandmother made the following comment in response: “We’re running out of indexing projects for English.” This comment stuck out to me, knowing what I know about my grandmother....

What’s New in The Family History Guide

Here’s a recap of the latest happenings with The Family History Guide: 1. QUIKLinks Reach the 5,000 Milestone Recently we added about 50 new QUIKLinks in The Family History Guide to record collections from FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and Findmypast. That puts the total number at over 5,000 (and growing). You can find QUIKLinks where you see the lightning-bolt icons in...