Mar 2020
Fee Tails and Entailment
In her 1989 NGSQ article, “The Adeustone-Rogers Families of Virginia: Tracing a Colonial Lineage through Entailment and Naming Patterns,” the late Margaret Hickerson Emery provided a definition of the term that was key to solving her genealogical problem: Fee tail or entailment, as defined by Black’s Law Dictionary, is the encumbrance of property with a […]
Mar 2020
Taking Your First Steps Around the 1870 “Brick Wall” in African American Research
For African Americans who were enslaved until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865, the 1870 census was the first federal census to name them. Since the slave schedules of the 1850 and 1860 censuses only referred to slaves by tick marks, sex, and age, connecting the people identified in 1870 to their pre-emancipation identities […]
Feb 2020
The Creation of Leap Year and Its Effects on Genealogy
This Saturday is February 29th, a relatively uncommon occurrence as days go. It’s a leap day in a leap year. Unless you’re like Dinah Shore, Tony Robbins, or Ja Rule, all of whom share a birthday that day, you may not even notice. For the rest of us, it’s a subtle reminder that calendars change. […]
Feb 2020
Little-Used NGS Resources: The Book Loan Collection
I don’t blame you. I really don’t. I’ve never used it myself. So who am I to point a finger? When the National Genealogical Society was founded in 1903 in Washington, DC, it established a library for its members. That library continued to grow for the next 98 years, amassing more than 20,000 volumes of […]
Jan 2020
Hearing Voices
Former NGS board member B. Darrell Jackson had an unusual request for his birthday. He asked his three adult children to read one of the six books he has written on their family history and write about their impressions. His son’s response was particularly thoughtful. I am struck overall about how little we can know […]
Jan 2020
Three Updates at the National Archives
Record Group Explorer The National Archives houses billions of pages of records, a volume so significant that researchers can easily be overwhelmed. A new tool released by the Archives makes it easier to browse those records by record group. The Record Group Explorer first shows record groups organized by volume of textual records, from the […]
Nov 2019
USCIS Fee Hike Proposal
According to Records, Not Revenue, “an ad hoc group of genealogists, historians and records access activists,” U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) recently proposed a 492% increase in fees for historical records held by the USCIS Genealogy Program. Until December 16th only **UPDATE; extended to February 10th**, the Federal Rulemaking Portal is accepting comments from […]
Nov 2019
Highlights from the 2020 Family History Conference Program
I’m not normal; on this I’m clear. But for reasons that remain a mystery, I take an inordinate amount of pleasure from opening up a conference program for the first time, perusing the pages, and marking the presentations that catch my attention (in red ink, no less). Some lectures I mark because they address a […]
Oct 2019
Land Evidences and Geographic Clues: Mapping As a Research Tool
It’s probably our most common research problem: A variety of records contain the same name; do those records refer to one person or to two or more? I’ve referred in the past to examples of solutions that differentiated men of the same name, including “Untangling the 15 Henry Hoffs of York County.”[1] There are instances, […]
Oct 2019
Sheriffs and Other Grantors You Should Know
You’re stuck. You were tracing your ancestor’s land ownership, and everything was going just fine. He bought; he sold; he bought; he sold; he bought again . . . but when and where is the sale of that last tract? It’s clear he didn’t own the land when he wrote his will, so what happened […]