Seeking Connection: The Importance of Family History
Seeking connection through family history is the goal of genealogy researchers. Learn how to get started finding your ancestors. Family can mean different things to different people. For some, it means to be with people who understand and accept you unconditionally. For others, it is strictly those to whom they have a biological connection. Some of us don’t have ideal families, while others couldn’t imagine their life without family. Most often, though, it’s a mixture of each of these types of relationships. When I think about my most ideal family relationships, I think of my dad’s Germans-from-Russia Mennonite cousins, double cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents… you get the idea. It’s…
Understanding Your AncestryDNA Matches
Your AncestryDNA results are in. Maybe you’ve always been interested in genealogy, or perhaps you received the test as a gift, and really have no idea what to expect. There is a learning curve to understand DNA test results, even for seasoned genealogists. AncestryDNA’s test is an autosomal DNA test, which looks at chromosomes 1-22 and the X-chromosome and provides information about many relationships and ancestors from both paternal and maternal ancestral lines. This post focuses on AncestryDNA’s results, but several other companies which offer autosomal DNA testing, including MyHeritage, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA, provide similar features. Autosomal DNA results include ethnicity predictions, as well as a “match list” – a…
An Introductory Guide to Scandinavian Naming Patterns
Welcome Jenny Hansen of My Favorite Ancestor as a guest writer today! One of the biggest challenges for research in Denmark, Norway and Sweden is understanding the Scandinavian naming patterns. I have an experiment I like to conduct when I teach groups about Scandinavian research. I ask, “Who here is related to Hans Jensen?” Usually the majority of the room answers in the affirmative. This question would be similar to asking if anyone is related to John Smith, except multiplied by about 100! Scandinavian Naming Patterns Our Scandinavian ancestors, like many other cultures, used patronymic surnames. The term patronymics refers to the practice of using the father’s given name as…
Worth a Thousand Words: How to Find and Use Image-Only Collections on FamilySearch
If you’ve entered your family names in databases like Ancestry.com and didn’t find the answer you needed, your search is not done! Did you know there are millions of pages of records digitized online at FamilySearch that don’t show up when you conduct a general search? FamilySearch runs a massive crowdsourced indexing program where volunteers like you or I can spend time transcribing records. These transcriptions can then be queried by the website’s search engines, and that process is how you are able to locate an image by searching for a name. These indexing projects are organized by record type, time period, and language. Some collections are larger than others,…
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