Reading Old Handwriting

If you have ever found old documents related to your family, you’ve probably struggled to read the writing on them. I’ve puzzled over the interpretation of an old blessing document for several years with little progress. After spending an hour studying the document, I’ll lay it down for a week or month and [...]

Read Full Post »

Family Genie Toolbar

A new tool bar dedicated to family history research called ‘Family Genie’ is now available for Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. The download link to it is found on Mario Hipol’s blog,I’ve used Mario’s LDS research toolbar for some time. About two months ago I asked him if he’d ever considered creating [...]

Read Full Post »

Vital Record Searches

Many states are adding vital records information to their state websites. As an example, today I looked at the Massachusetts Archives pages posted under the name of William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth. My ancestors lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts for almost 300 years and so I hoped to find [...]

Read Full Post »

What a great time to be alive!

“What a great time to be alive!” I said it out loud again sitting in my home office last night. I work for footnote.com and see samplings of the millions of images of historical records the company is posting on our site every month. The quantity of records, historical documents and old newspapers flowing by [...]

Read Full Post »

The Unexpected Photo

Family history researchers often encounter unexpected ‘finds’ related to their research. Recently, our daughter stopped in at a local bakery to pickup a few favorite ‘honey buns’ for her family. Looking at the signs of the few businesses between her vehicle and the bakery, she saw a 3ft by 4ft photo of [...]

Read Full Post »