My Trails into the Past

I wrote about my cool find at the new FamilySearch feature of every word search in US land and probate records. This game-changer has allowed me to locate more records than I had found using just the land indexes and probate indexes. Sometimes the clerk might forget to record the transaction in the index, or if the index was copied into a new modern system, an entry might get missed. Ever wondered how an ancestor got a deed for the land they were selling? It might be missing from the index but is in the deed book. My post yesterday on my other blog , showed how to locate these cool documents. Today, I want to show how to locate the information you need to create source citations. This document is found within the new “images” section, so the procedure I used in the past does not work. The digital film number is not listed above the images as it was before when accessing documents from the catalog entry. Below is the results page for the Coor-Hoggatt agreement. Let’s work our way a...

I am doing one big happy dance today. Besides writing about my find, I want to give a tip on how I finally found a record I had been looking for. I had been looking for the death record for my great-grandfather’s brother, the Reverend Father Albert M. Hork, for many years. He died in 1912 and I have visited his tombstone at the convent cemetery of the Sisters of St. Mary’s in Beaverton, Oregon. [1] I had searched in various Oregon death indexes online at FamilySearch and Ancestry with no luck. I really wanted to write more about him because an obituary stated “he had come to Oregon on account of his health,” and “about a year ago his health became so poor that it was necessary for him to retire from active service.” [2] More information came from the obituary written about him in the diocesan newspaper, Catholic Sentinel . It appeared that he had been of ill health all of his life:     “He left his native country and entered the Scolasticate of the Jesuit Fathers at...

We all have brick walls. Many are tough to solve because there are no records directly giving us the answer. Some we create ourselves because we don’t recognize clues of indirect evidence in documents that might help us. I present on this topic to local genealogical societies and have two tips that might jumpstart a researcher who is stuck. Review Your Previous Work If we have been researching a long time, we may have research notes or documents we have collected a long time ago when we were just starting out that we have not looked at again. At the early stage, we tend collect every document with our family names on them and then put them aside when they don’t name our direct ancestor. Review also all of your previous documents. We tend to get excited about a document that answers a particular question but do not pay as much attention to the other information listed on the document. Perhaps now, some of that information will make more sense. An example of this: I had the date...

After many years of looking, I have found the marriage date for my grandmother’s sister, Ethel Elizabeth Quigley’s marriage to John Vir Quigley. I wasn’t looking at the time for her marriage, but instead was working on World War I draft cards. I made a spreadsheet with the names of all of the men in my database who were found in these draft cards. I double-checked these names against the images on my computer and sometimes I needed to return to Ancestry to see the actual images. When looking at John Vir Quigley’s card, one of the hints that Ancestry showed was to the “Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999” database.  His name was right so I clicked on it. It was a link to The Butte Miner newspaper in Montana about the marriage of Ethel Elizabeth Sullivan to John Vir Quigley in Burlingame, California, on 20 October 1925! [1] According to the article, Ethel, a former Anaconda girl and daughter of John H. Sullivan, was married to John V. Quigley of San Francisco at St. Cath...

I have been reading Janine Adams' blog "Organize Your Family History" and she conducted a 30 x 30 challenge in August. What she did was take thirty minutes every single day for a month to conduct genealogy research. She is doing the challenge again and are asking others to join her. In today's blog post titled, "The Value of Daily Research," she gave 6 reasons to do some genealogy every day. Check out her post here . I have not joined her challenge, but I try to do some genealogy task everyday. Sometimes I'm finding documents on Ancestry  or FamilySearch . Other times I'm entering data from my "To Be Filed" folder on my computer. Mostly, though, I have been focused on my portfolio for BCG certification . I am currently working on my Kinship Determination Project (KDP) and in the process of writing the biographies/stories of the three generations, I end up researching to find missing documents, new interesting tidbits of their lives...