August 8, 2014

The last I heard, Ancestry.com has north of 10 BILLION records online.  Anyway you slice it that’s a LOT of records, and it’s certainly far more than my humble search skills can comfortably navigate.

That’s why I’m tickled to see that they have introduced Research Guides. Tucked in their free section (no membership required) is a portfolio of subject-specific research guides for anyone and everyone to use.  The guides help you navigate the 10 billion records and tens of thousands of databases on Ancestry.com, which is great in and of itself.  But they also give you subject-specific helpful insight such as history, key terms, abbreviations, and other information far and away beyond a simple description of a database.

Quaker Research

One of their research guides is the Research Guide to Finding Your Quaker Ancestors.  It’s an eight-page, well written and designed cheat sheet to understanding the nature and complexity of Quaker research.  Naturally, they explain who the Quakers are with a little blurb on Quakers and Slavery.  Then they break down the nature of Quaker Records – the meeting hierarchy, they explain the birth and death registers and the marriage records.  Then they explain the uniquely Quaker certificates of removal, disownments and apologies.  Finally, there is a discussion of uniquely Quaker terms to help you unpack this world.  I’m surprised that they don’t list the Quaker databases on Ancestry.com.  Maybe there are just too many to list.  (You can go to the SEARCH drop-down list and search the card catalog for the keyword “Quaker,” and probably get the vast majority of the databases.) Nonetheless, it is a very helpful guide.

Loyalist Research

Another interesting guide is the one on Loyalists.  It’s my understanding that one-third of the Colonists were actively supporting the Revolution, one-third were Loyalists (supportive of England), and the last third weren’t interested and had better things to do such as tend to their farms.  No doubt there are plenty of Loyalist descendants looking for information and records.  This guide offers a brief history to understand the Loyalists, then it gives an extended list of hyperlinked databases for your researching pleasure.  Just click on the database of your choice and start searching.  Just follow this link (Loyalist Resources on Ancestry) to get started.

These are just two of the guides you will find.  There are about two dozen at the moment and it looks like they are adding more regularly.  Here are a couple more.

• Search Strategies on Ancestry
• Using Religious Records
• African American Research on Ancestry
• Finding your Immigrant Ancestors on Ancestry
• Find them in WWII
• Black Sheep: 10 Things to Know

Again, this is just a sampling.  Go to the main page for Research Guides in the Learning Center – you can access it here – for the full and updated list.  And check back often, as I mentioned they seem to be adding more and more.  Indeed, you can even submit a suggestion for a new guide.

I’m glad to see Ancestry offering help navigating their vast collection to genealogists.  I hope you’ll find these research guides helpful as I have.

Happy Researching!

 

 

May 3, 2014

Have you ever run into this?  A headstone that gives you the years, months, and days a person lived and the deceased’s death date but not his birth date.  If your reaction is like mine, you’re saying to yourself, “ugh, now how do I figure out the birth date?”

The family of Jonas E. Greenwood did just that.  I have great information on the stone if only I could access it.

Headstones can be treasures of genealogical information if only we can decipher their magical codes.

Have No Fear, The Answer is Here!

I just knew some bright person would sooner or later come up with a “simple” date calculator and put it online for me to use.  And lo and behold someone has.  I was just in an email conversation with a gentleman about the Jonas Greenwood headstone pictured here, and my fellow genealogist was very kind to send me a link to www.timeanddate.com.

Time and Date.com

This site as you might imagine is all about time and date.  They have lots of clocks, time zone maps, weather information, and time and date calculators.

If you want to know how long a person live or the time between the death of one spouse and the death of another you can use the Date to Date Calculator.  It calculates the time duration between any two given dates.

However, if you want to know a historic – or future – date as in the case above where we know Jonas Greenwood’s death date and the amount of time he lived, we can use the Date Calculator.  With this you use one fixed date plus a time duration (days, months, years) and calculate missing beginning or ending point.

It is super simple to use.  Just put in the information you know such as the death date and the years, months, and days the person lived and click on “calculate,”  And in less than the time it takes to say “ta da,” you have your answer.  Note:  you may need to scroll down the page (below the “fold”) on the screen to see the answer as I did, depending on the size of your computer screen.  But that’s the only caveat.  You can play this game all day long with all of those tricky headstones you’ve been perplexed by.  It’s fun, and it’s free.

By the way, Jonas E. Greenwood was born on March 4, 1825, lived 77 years, 4 months, and 17 days, dying on July 21, 1902.  Isn’t that neat?  With the calculator I can complete the story of his lifespan using his birth and death dates as bookends.  Where before I had only two facts, now I have a whole story.

Dig out your headstone pictures and start calculating!

Happy researching!