Your author is so very lucky that her first cousin once removed, the inimitable late Jesse Walter (JW) West, was so ahead of his time and took a lot of video footage in the late 60s through the 70s… including my parents’ wedding! I thought I would share this 90 second hidden gem here on
This little tip has stood me well in finding “missing” male head-of-household ancestors in the 1850-1880 US census, and might help you, too! (Note that I’ll be saying “him” a lot in this post because in this case we’re usually seeking a fellow.) (Its better than shouting “Show yourself!” at your computer screen when your
I’m dipping in and out of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, which is Amy Johnson Crow’s worthy effort to get us to share more of our family and genealogy stories. This week’s topic is “Favorite Photo,” but of course I had to choose two! These aren’t just any family photos – they’re five-generation portraits of
The last two years have been all about formalizing my genealogy education. And this year will be more of the same, but with the added bonus that I’ll be doing all that around a robust load of very interesting clients and some fun speaking gigs! That said, I have one big, bad goal for this
Way back on January 8th I posted my 2024 genealogy game plan and I’m happy to say that I crossed most everything I wanted to do off my checklist, and then a little more besides! Such as… Becoming a Professional Genealogist But the most important thing I did was actually start taking clients as a
This is the tale of how AI literally showed me up regarding summarizing historic tax laws. Genealogists in Georgia are all too aware that our early censuses are missing.1 And because of that, we need to find other ways to identify our early Georgia ancestors. Fortunately, many early Georgia counties have tax records to make
As genealogists, we’re always lucky when we find the family historians who came before us. My mom’s first cousin Dub West and his wife Christine were able to collect some West and Hester family photos. Unfortunately, many of those photos were unlabeled and nobody living knew who they were. That’s where we come in! Can
Rather watch on YouTube? It appears FamilySearch has quietly opened their court records to FamilySearch’s AI-powered search! Why is AI-enabled search of court records game changing? When launched, FamilySearch allowed users to search Land and Probate records using AI full text search. This was an immediate game changer for many genealogists, allowing us to find
Part of my genealogy education has been writing proof arguments. I was able to determine my brick wall ancestor George W. West’s birthdate using a really cool document known informally as “The Joe Brown Census” and some intense documentary research. Here’s what I came up with. Proving George W. West’s Birthdate Question: What was the
One of the great southern authors, Dorothy Allison, once said that we Southerners like to tell “evil mean stories.” For example, when I was very small, and my sister even smaller, a family member told us a tale out of our family tree. As the story went, our ancient ol’ many times great-grandpa (let’s call