I’m excited to choose my research objective for the upcoming 2025 14-Day Research Like a Pro Challenge! It starts on January 21. As I look through my research questions and think about which one to tackle, I love seeing what I have learned from past challenges. I also asked in our Facebook group to hear what others’ learned. The structured daily approach has helped so many of us make breakthroughs in our family history research....
Do you have a family or individual who seems to be missing in the US census? You may have thought they were traveling or somehow skipped. Although this situation did occur, it could also be that employing some specific techniques could find those ancestors. In this article, I’ll share three tips that aided me in my search for my Weatherford family. Tip # 1 Revisit the Family The first thing to do is to revisit...
In this episode, Diana and Nicole discuss finding immigration records for ancestors arriving in the United States after 1906. They provide a timeline of important immigration laws and their impacts, such as the 1906 establishment of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, the 1917 Immigration Act, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, the 1924 National Origins Act, the 1945 War Brides Act, the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act, and the 1965...
This episode of Research Like a Pro focuses on the intricacies of tracing immigration records in genealogical research. Diana and Nicole discuss the common challenges faced when trying to locate an ancestor’s passenger list and the various entry points into the U.S., such as New York, New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Canada, and Mexico. They emphasize the importance of combing through U.S. records for clues about an ancestor’s home country, ship’s name, date of immigration,...
Online Repository Assistant (https://www.ora-extension.com), also known as ORA, is a browser extension and Windows application created by John Cardinal. It works with many common online “repositories” like FamilySearch, Ancestry, FindaGrave, FindMyPast, Fold3, and more, to extract data from records and make it easier to paste text into your genealogy software or research report. I wrote a little about it in my post, Automated Source Citation Builders. ORA allows you to create your own text templates...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about an outcast in our family tree. Diana shares how she responded to the 52 Ancestors prompt to write about an ancestor who was an outcast. She chose William “Dick” Shults, who fled town after a gunfight and settled in Arizona. He made it into the newspapers several times in the early 1900s due to run-ins with the law and other events. Join us as we discuss...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about the Family Locket Genealogists project to write up our client’s research about James William Johnson and his origins. In episode 256, we interviewed James Wesley Johnson about his ancestor James William Johnson and the discovery that James was actually Patrick Alford. James asked Family Locket to verify his research and write up the research professionally. Michelle Mickelson, one of our researchers, took on this task, and...
When I began my genealogy journey, I carefully sorted the papers inherited from my dad’s research and started building my family tree. Those were the days before online trees so I used Personal Ancestral File (PAF). I worked hard to document each person and generation with sources – using the newly digitized censuses available on Ancestry and research done at the Family Search Library in Salt Lake City. Eventually, though, I came to a stopping...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about the 1950 census that will be released on April 1, 2022. Diana shares an example of finding the enumeration district (ED) of her grandparents in Cassia County, Idaho. We review the information that can be found on the 1950 census and discuss indexing efforts. Join us as we discuss how to prepare for this census release! Transcript Nicole (1s): This is Research Like a Pro episode...
Today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is about the non-population schedules of the U.S. Federal Census. We also discuss the Veteran’s Schedule of 1890, which is technically a special schedule. Alice Childs joins us again to discuss census records and shares examples from her own research in the mid-Atlantic states. We talk about how these census records can help add historical context to our ancestor’s lives. Join us as we discuss the agricultural schedules,...
