Tens of thousands of genealogy-related books have been digitized, indexed, and made available online. These include family histories, local histories, military regimental histories, and other reference materials.

 

This seminar will show you what types of materials are available, the primary Internet sites where they can be located, and how to access these books.

In the course of our genealogical research, we often become engrossed in the collection of information snippets, failing to put them into a logical perspective. We lose sight of the fact that the people we're tracing participated in the life of their historical times, led complex lives, and interacted with one another. 
 

Organizing the information we collect into a biographical profile can help you begin to recognize character traits and decision patterns. And the profile also provides an invaluable, portable research tool that avoids your taking voluminous amounts of notes with you on research trips. 

 

This seminar presents a methodology and a structured model for taking the details you collect about your ancestor and creating a biographical profile.

The U.S. Constitution called for a regular enumeration of the population of this new country, beginning in 1790 and continuing every ten years through the most recent census of 2010. For genealogists and family history researchers, census records are an essential and invaluable source for geographically locating their family over time, as well as for pointing to other original, primary records for other information.

 

Unfortunately, though, a very significant number of researchers lack an understanding of the records themselves. They don't know that most of the population schedules they examine are probably transcripts of the original or even second transcriptions. Likewise, few researchers ever look beyond the population schedules to the other schedule documents: Veteran's and Widows Schedules, Slave Schedules (which are useful to both African and non-African ancestored researchers alike), Agricultural Schedules, Manufacturing Schedules, Social Statistics Schedules, and the Schedules of the Defective, Dependent and Delinquent Classes. Federal Enumeration District Maps, too, can provide insights for more quickly locating the schedules on which ancestors are listed. Even the important Soundex and Miracode finding aids are little understood and/or used.