By Jayne McGarvey Are you considering exploring your Irish roots for the first time, or want to investigate your family history further but are unsure where to start? Irish genealogy has somewhat of a reputation for being a disappointing and frustrating pastime for amateur family historians. Stories of people hitting the dreaded brick wall, and that all the…
Can family history research be free? When I first started to research my family history over 30 years ago, I was told it was a very expensive hobby as you had to purchase many birth, marriage and death certificates and you MUST go to London to do it properly. Well I did not do…
By Tina Sansone I came across some helpful aids while doing your family history while traveling. Here are some items to have for your genealogical travel kit. Stationery: Notebook, pens, and files or folders in which to keep your valuable documents, photographs and local information. Documents: Copies (not originals) of vital records and other archival…
By Charlotte Andersen History about Danish Graveyards and Cemeteries During the Middle Ages and until the Romanticism at the beginning of the 1800s, the graveyard was not designed the same way as it is today. The graveyard was a simple grass field surrounded by the church stone wall. There were some monuments, simple grave markers…
By Sharon Hall The King of Genealogical Fraud Swedish-born Gustave Anjou perhaps got off on the wrong foot in life, so to speak, as Gustaf Ludvig Jungberg, the illegitimate son of Carl Gustaf Jungberg and his family’s housekeeper Maria Lovisa Hagberg. After serving a prison term for forgery in 1886, he changed his name to…
By Sharon Hall Genealogy has become one of the world’s most popular hobbies. USA Today noted that genealogy was bested only by the number one hobby of gardening. In terms of Internet searches genealogy is second behind (regrettably) pornography. It’s no wonder genealogy research has become such a popular pursuit with popular television programming…
By Jayne McGarvey Many adoptees experience various degrees of personal conflict within the discipline of family tree research – often unsure whether to trace by adoption, birth or both and are also unsure how to display and record such information. Similar concerns can be encountered by many researchers when encountering either a formal or informal adoption…
This post is written specifically about Christian headstones/symbols. Other religions do not have the same images. By Paul Hackley I’m a cemetery stalker. You can usually find me there on my free time. I love to decipher the headstones and imagine who is buried there, each stone telling a different story. I’ve learned a few…
By Jayne McGarvey Saint Patrick’s Day, or the Feast of Saint Patrick (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig, “the Day of the Festival of Patrick”), is a cultural and religious celebration held on 17 March, the traditional death date of Saint Patrick (c. AD 385–461), the foremost patron saint of Ireland. This seems rather a good day to review some of the more recent collections that…
By Ericka Guzzard Several months ago I wrote a blog entitled DNA in Genealogy: How does this help me? to explain some of the basics of genetic testing and the different types of tests available for genealogy, and much of the feedback to that blog asked questions about which companies would be reputable and reliable…