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The Internet went a little wacky a couple of weeks ago, when Congress seemed on the road to considering the Stop Online Piracy Act proposed by Rep. Lamar S. Smith.
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Genealogy is getting a double dose of star treatment on television this season.
Few of us remember applying for our Social Security cards, or our parents did it for us, so it might not occur to us that those files hold clues about our heritage.
We'd all like to believe that the family stories we heard at Grandma's knee were sacred truths. None of us wants to believe that our sainted grandmothers would have lied to us.
Keeping ancestors organized is no small task. A logical and universally recognized numbering system is one good way to quickly spot exactly where a person falls in the family scheme.
During the course of genealogical research, we aren't concerned just with where a person fits on the family tree — we also want to put each ancestor into historical perspective.
Wouldn't it be nice if family historians could go to a single website and find links to every conceivable place to search for their roots?
Old family records date back to the 1500s
Was Rosie the Riveter your grandma? Was your grandpa one of the World War II versions of G.I. Joe? Many of that generation no longer are with us. Some of us never even knew those family members or got the opportunity to talk to them about what they did in the war.
Is Santa still looking for that perfect gift for the family historian? I have no doubt that any genealogist would appreciate getting a Flip Pal mobile scanner. It is a truly nifty invention, and I've test run it for most situations a researcher will experience.
Genealogical research trips can be scary. Part of the anxiety is that sometimes we don't even know what we're searching for or if we're in the right place.
Breathing life into an ancestor can inflate him from a one-dimensional name on a piece of paper into a three-dimensional person who experienced life in his own unique way.
It's rare to come across a person as beloved and respected as John Jordan Whiddon.
Several years ago, Arphax Publishing Co. popped into the genealogical spotlight with its historical land ownership maps.
It's etched in stone.
Modern-day genealogists often find it incomprehensible that for periods of history, married women couldn't make wills. This oddity was ruled by a legal concept called coverture.
Most of us family historians joke that our ancestors sometimes speak to us.
"Genealogy is so simple and easy to do that it can be done in five minutes." That's the very misleading introductory remark on a video on the popular Mormon Church website, FamilySearch.org.
Names are important to all of us. In a technology-dependent society, we all live with the fear of identity theft — someone taking our names and doing assorted things pretending to be us.
Military records have long been among the most valuable and treasured documents used by family historians. So it's big news that an established subscription website now has morphed into what promises to be the definitive portal to these important records.
When Michael Dawsey sat down in 1844 to write his sister Amelia, he couldn't have realized the adventurous route the letter would take or how it would connect future generations of the family.
Evidence connecting one generation of a family to another often isn't very strong. Sometimes lines on a pedigree chart are so thin, they're barely visible. But with determination and persistence, a good genealogist can fatten those lines and build a solid case for a family history.
With rising gas prices and bad financial times, we genealogists – like everyone else – try to find ways to economize. The LDS church has just taken a giant step forward in helping us save some on our gas budget.
In some ways, the census is representative of government sprawl. It began in 1790, and for 50 years it was a document that simply recorded heads of households and the age, race and sex (but not names) of those living in each home.
Lying peacefully in a little Trilby cemetery are four sibling babies whose tombstones carry no names. Who they were and why their brief lives were cut short has been lost to time.
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