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Hours of Operation:
Mon: Closed
Fri: 9:30 am-1:00 pm
Saturday:
9:30 am-4:30 pm
Tues, Wed, Thurs:
9:30am-4:30pm, & 7-9:30 pm
Directors: Linda & Kurt Christensen Washington DC Stake Carol & Gary Petranek, Silver Spring MDStake |
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WDC FHC News
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Upcoming Classes
Saturday, November 15
9:30-10:30 Researching Norwegian Ancestry
Presenter: Linda Balderson
Jump start your research into Norwegian ancestry by learning the basics of how and where to begin; which websites and repositories are most helpful; and online resources for collaboration.
All classes are free of charge, but registration is requested.
* Join a Focus Group to Enhance Your Research Skills *
African-American: weekly on Monday mornings at 10:00.
Beginning Genealogy: weekly on Tuesday mornings at 10:00. Contact Lorraine Minor at ldgene@verizon.net for further information.
DNA Group: November 12 December 3.
Eastern European Group: monthly on the 4th Saturday at noon; focus countries: Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Irish Group: bi-weekly meetings on the 1st, 3rd & 5th Tuesday evenings at 7:00.
RootsMagic Users Group: Monthly meetings on the 2nd Saturday at 9:30 a.m.
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12 Keys to Analyzing the Vitals Section of Newspapers
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by Kenneth R. Marks
The Vitals section of the newspaper is the most pursued by genealogy newspaper researchers - primarily because that is where death notices and obituaries reside. But there are more than just obits in this important section.
This article gives examples of Vitals sections in old newspapers and continues with a list of the keys to getting the most for your family history research out of them: click here.
Source: The Ancestor Hunt, October 14, 2014
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Naturalization Records: Where to Find Them
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by Lou Szucs
Naturalization is the legal procedure by which an alien becomes a citizen of a state or country...From the time the first naturalization act was passed in 1790 until 1906, there were no uniform standards. As a consequence, before September 1906, the various federal, state, county, and local courts generated a wide variety of citizenship records that are stored in sundry courts, archives, warehouses, libraries and private collections.
The biographical information in citizenship papers assumes importance as a link to the past, and sometimes represents the only way to discover the Old World origins of an individual or a family.
Another value of citizenship papers is that they often fill the gaps where other records are missing. For example, most states did not require the registration of births and deaths until well after 1900 and in some cases a date on a naturalization document may be the only means of discovering when an individual was born.
To read the full article, click here.
Source: The Ancestry Blog, October 14, 2014
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5 Reasons You're Not Finding Your Ancestor
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 | | Five Reasons You Are Not Finding Your Ancestor |
You have searched and searched and searched and are still coming up empty when looking for information about a particular family line. Join Crista Cowan for a look at five possible reasons why you might not be finding your ancestor. Even one of them could provide you with the spark of an idea you need to bust right through that genealogy brick wall.
Published October 21, 2014
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Don't Forget the Babies!
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by James Tanner
Permits for Burial are among the forgotten records accompanying the interment process. Many genealogists, especially those beginning the process of research, think of birth and death certificates. In the absence of such tangible evidence of a person's death, they are at a loss to find any other records. Permits for Burial were and are common throughout the United States. During the course of the project, it became very evident to me that these documents often acted as the only written record of some of the burials in the cemetery. Preservation of these records can be haphazard. They may have been preserved in a location associated with the cemetery or lie in cabinets and boxes stored anywhere from a public library to a mortuary or funeral home.
Despite their common use and requirement, Permits for Burial are missing from almost all lists of record types and are not included in the large online database programs.
To read the full article and see an example of a Permt for Burial, click here.
Source: Genealogy's Star, October 7, 2014
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Identity Problems and the FAN Principle
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by Elizabeth Shown Mills
Biographical research on people from the past is a gamble. Our person of interest may or may not have been literate. Even the schooled may have left few traces of their existence. Many documents we expect to find for the place and time will have suffered destruction. The answers we seek to specific research questions may not appear in any surviving record created by our person.1
All these trials explain why many successful researchers live by the FAN Principle: When those we study left no document to handily supply the information we seek, we often find it in the records created by members of their FAN Club-their Friends, Associates, and Neighbors.
Identifying someone of common name, distinguishing them from other same-name people, is always a challenge. Identifying a female of common name, from an era in which women lived domestic lives sheltered from the public eye, can seem impossible. It's not-not if we apply that FAN Principle....
The evidences we use to reconstruct human lives-all too frequently-are not outright statements of "fact." For want of those ideal documents, handily left to us by diligent scribes, successful researchers learn to harvest clues. Bits and shards of evidence that prove nothing by themselves can be immensely valuable as pointers to other records or as fragments we can assemble to build a case for whatever question we seek to answer.
To read the full article which includes a case study and step-by-step process of discovery, click here.
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17 Genealogy Things to Do If You Have Only a Few Minutes
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by Diane Haddad
Sometimes life gets in the way, and you can't find a decent stretch of time to sit at your computer or go to the library and do some genealogy. In the mean time: 5 or 15 minutes might not be enough to delve into the life and times of your most stubborn brick wall ancestor, but it is enough time to do one of these quick genealogy tasks:
- Check your tree and make sure you have a 1940 census entry for everyone alive at the time. For the missing ones, you can search the 1940 census for free.
- Search the Social Security Death Index for US folks who died after 1962.
- Run a Google Books search for an ancestor you don't have much on.
- Open mystery genealogy files on your computer, see what they are, and rename them according to a system. Now you know what the file is without opening it.
- File the loose genealogy files on your computer desktop, or the papers on your actual desktop.
- Write two paragraphs about an ancestor's life.
- Any relative you don't have burial information for, search for him or her on Find A Grave, BillionGraves and/or Interment.net.
- Transcribe a record into your family tree software (or wherever you keep record transcriptions).
- Add to Great-grandma's or another relative's life timeline, using your family tree software or our free, downloadable Biographical Outline.
- Read a few pages of a county or family history.
- Check your favorite genealogy blogs for the latest news.
- Call an older relative and make an appointment to visit and talk about family history.
- Scan several photos.
- Write a journal entry or blog post.
- Share a genealogy find with your family on Facebook.
- Think of all the crazy ways last names in your family could be spelled, and write them all down so you can try them when you search genealogy websites. We have a free Surname Variants chart you can download, print and fill out.
- Tag photos in your photo-organizing software.
Source: GenealogyInsider Blog, September 10, 2014
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Six Things to Look for in City Directories
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by Juliana Szucs
City directories are incredible sources. In many cities, they were published annually, which can give us a lot of detail about our ancestors. Here are six things to look for in city directories:
- Your Ancestor and Other Family Members
- Streets and Maps
- Churches and Clerics
- Cemeteries
- Advertisements
- Historical Information
To read the details and see examples of each of these categories, click here.
Source: Ancestry Blog, July 9, 2014
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Are Your Cousins Removed?
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by Beth Taylor
You may have heard some people use  phrases like "she's my fifth cousin, twice removed," or "he's my second cousin, nine times removed." What does this mean and how could I figure out my relationship to my friend using these terms?
In English, there are specific terms to describe the relationships between people of the same generation, meaning people who are the same number of generations from a common ancestor.
- Siblings share a common parent
- Cousins share a common grandparent
- Second cousins share a common great grandparent
- Third cousins share a common second great grandparent
- Fourth cousins share a common third great grandparent
- Fifth cousins share a common fourth great grandparent
The details and charts in this article will help you better understand cousin relationships. Click here.
Source: FamilySearch Blog, June26, 2014 |
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Search Tips for Census Success
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by Kimberly Powell
We all have ancestors we would swear were somehow skipped or overlooked by the census taker. It's more than likely that some of them were. More often, however, it's an indexing error that has us running in circles. When online census indexes leave you pulling out your hair in frustration, try these census search tips for locating your 'misplaced' ancestor.
- Don't count solely on soundex
- Try a wildcard search
- Familiarize yourself with nicknames
- Check the middle names
- Search by surname and location
- Search for initials
- Search for siblings, children or other family members
- Search for neighbors
- Leave out the name entirely
To read the full article with details on each category, clic here.
Source: About: Genealogy, April 8, 2014
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Genealogy "Tips of the Day"
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by Michael John Neill
Are You Using a Transcription? If you are using a transcribed copy of a document, it is possible that the transcription contains errors or omissions? All it takes is one little thing "off" to create a "brick wall."
Were Those Adopted Children Related? Don't always assume that "adopted" children were unrelated to the family. There could have been some relationship between the adopted child and the parents. The child could have been the grandchild of the couple or a child of a sibling or other family member. But there's also nothing saying that the adopted child was related either. It's just something to think about.
Estate Inventories as Clues. Inventories of your ancestor's estate can not only give you an idea of his worth at the time of his death, but they can (among other things) tell you who his associates were (look at who owed him money or whom he owed money) and what his probable occupation was. Inventories are more than simply lists of items.
Back to a Previous Name? For a variety of reasons your female relative may have chosen to revert to a previous maiden name. One relative did not have any children with her second husband to whom she was married just a few years. After his death, she reverted to her first husband's last name. Divorced women sometimes revert to previous names as well.
Marriage may not have been the only time your female kin changed their name.
Children with the Same Name. Your ancestor and their spouse may have had more than one child with the same name. In some families it was common to "reuse" names of children who had died as infants. Consequently a couple may have children named Geske born in 1852, 1856 and 1859--if the first two died. Couples may also have children with names so similar that a researcher does not realize the children are different--naming children Lucinda and Lucena can confuse researchers. And other families give children names that are different in their homeland but are different in the country where they settled--Johann and Jann may both get anglicized as John. Don't assume those kids with the "same name" are all the same kid.
Locating the Relatively Recent. Sometimes in our attempts to research back into the distant past we forget the relatively recent past and the ancestral clues that may be contained there. Did your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents have any first cousins who died without descendants? If so, the settlement of their estate may name immediate (and not so immediate) members of their family? The situation is even better for the genealogist if the relative who died without descendants also had no siblings of their own as the inheritance may have been more involved and mention additional family members.
Source: Genealogy Tip of the Day
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Research Tips & Resources
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Genealogy in Belgium. Online resources to research ancestry in Belgium.
Finding Italian Records.
Tips for beginning Italian research.
Swedish Genealogy Resources.
A collection of online databases and records for Sweden.
Tracing Baja (Barbados) Roots.
Article with research tips from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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Thank you for subscribing to Generations. We hope this publication will motivate you to successfully begin or continue your family history research. We would like to hear from you! Please submit your questions, research tips, and favorite websites to us at info@wdcfhc.org
Sincerely,
Carol Petranek, Newsletter Editor
Linda & Kurt Christensen
Gary Petranek
Co-Directors, Washington DC Family History Center
10000 Stoneybrook Drive, PO Box 49
Kensington, MD 20895
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