Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about Marsha Hoffman Rising’s book, The Family Tree Problem Solver. Originally published in 2005, with a second edition in 2011, and a third edition in 2019, this book is a great resource for learning how to overcome challenges in our family tree. She covers difficult record types, record loss, cluster methodology, and more. Join us as we discuss several tips from the book and our thoughts about...
Have you ever researched a friend, associate, or neighbor to figure out how they were related to your research subject? Often, a marriage bondsman is related to the bride or groom, so researching them may prove a fruitful avenue of research. In my last post, I shared several examples of U.S. marriage bonds. See Back to the Basics with Marriage Records Part 1: Marriage Bonds. This post includes examples of marriage bonds from Orleans Parish,...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about Diana’s road trip to Oklahoma to visit sites relevant to her great-grandparents, William Huston Shults and Dora Algie Royston. She shares her experiences finding cemeteries, visiting small towns, and reading her ancestors’ stories as they drove around. She also shares a few tips for preparing for a family history road trip, including bringing a map and printing out the histories of your ancestors before you go....
Have you ever encountered a marriage bond in your genealogy research? I have used them quite a bit in my research in the mid-south. Today I’m sharing information about marriage bonds and several examples. One of our podcast listeners submitted a question about bondsmen, asking what it meant for a man to be a bondsman on a marriage bond. I will also attempt to answer that question through this post. What are Marriage Bonds? In...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about Diana’s findings in the Clemsy Cline Research project. Diana shares how her research logging and report writing went and then outlines what she found. Learn more about how she used land and tax records to track Jacob, John, and Mahala Cline, possible relatives of Clemsy, despite several relevant counties experiencing record loss. Transcript Nicole (1s): This is Research Like A Pro episode 230 Finding A Female’s...
Do you have any challenges in your research, such as people of the same name, pre-1850 research, or burned counties? If so, you need to check out the classic book by Marsha Hoffman Rising, The Family Tree Problem Solver, 3rd edition.21 (This is an affiliate link – if you click the link and make a purchase, we receive a commission but it doesn’t change the price of the book). The introduction gives the background of...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is an interview with Deborah Keyes, a member of our recent Research Like a Pro with DNA study group. Debbie shares her research project from the study group, which focused on proving a relationship between a Slagle man of European descent and a Carrington woman of African descent who lived in Virginia in the late 1800s. Genetic networks showed that there were many DNA matches between the descendants...
Would you like an efficient method to find clusters of DNA matches relevant to your research subject? In this series, I’m sharing the steps to create a network graph using the free, open source Gephi application, available for Windows or Mac. I use Gephi to create network graphs of my AncestryDNA matches. Throughout this series, I will be using my own matches from AncestryDNA, but I have changed their names for privacy. Below are the previous...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about pedigree collapse and its effect on DNA matching. We discuss the coefficient of relationship calculation and how that can help you estimate the expected amount of DNA two people should share based on the relationship in their trees. We talk about the Hopper case study with a DNA match with two individuals with multiple relationships and one of the test takers has pedigree collapse on the...
When researching our female ancestors who have few records naming them, to make progress, we need to do cluster research. We determine the people in her FAN club (Friends, Family, Associates, and Neighbors) and research them! My first post in this series discussed my ancestor, Mary Clemsy Cline, who was born about 1817 in Alabama and died after 1880 in Wise Couty, Texas. My initial analysis showed three individuals I want to explore as part...