Genealogy and Family History Stack Exchange
Genealogy and Family History Stack Exchange

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1500 questions
49
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12 answers

When documenting location, should current or historical place names be used?

When I am documenting records, do I use the name of a city or country as it is called today or as it was in the year an ancestor was there? Related to: When documenting place names, should I write them in my language or in their native language?
Jeni
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How do I encourage older folk to provide information?

My aging father is very interested in family history. The difficulty is he is interested in finding information about his distant relatives but not interested in telling about himself or his close relatives. What can I do to have him see the…
Charles
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What criteria should I look for to publish my cemetery records online?

I have several complete cemetery headstone transcriptions and some additional partial cemeteries. None appear to be indexed online. What criteria from free sites or free content on paid sites should I consider, so they are available to all for the…
Very Big Kid
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10 answers

What are the key features in genealogical software that will help me future proof my research?

I have been researching my family for about 15 years. I have used Microsoft Access for about 10 years to record my results. Microsoft no longer supports the version of Access I have. I have no need for Access in my other work, so do not wish…
Edward
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4 answers

What does it mean if cause of death is listed as "Insanity" in late 1800s?

My great, great grandmother's cause of death is listed as "Insanity" on her death record, and I'm not sure what this means. She died in Winsted, McLeod County, Minnesota in 1872 at age 37, and had just given birth to a daughter less than a month…
maguidhir
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10 answers

Transitioning from person-based genealogy to record-based genealogy?

When we start genealogy we know the persons who are closest to us in time so we are comfortable using software where each person record is a unique "conclusion" person. We create a person record for each real person as we add them, and then we add…
Tom Wetmore
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30
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6 answers

Recording name for infant who died unnamed?

Going back in my genealogy, I find children who died in infancy. Some were given names, some weren't. How should I record those with no given names? Often there were multiple unnamed children in a single family. I usually know the gender of the…
Luke_0
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6 answers

What can be gained by paying for a subscription website such as Ancestry?

I see many free sources of information available, either online, through libraries or in person eg freeBDM, micro fiche etc. My research interests are in Queensland, Australia for the past 130 years and England before that. I have seen the many…
Troy
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9 answers

Estimating year photo was taken or printed?

My wife's father was born in Queensland, Australia in 1930. He died in 1989. She has only 2 photos of him. One has no markings on the front or rear and nothing to identify the year taken. What avenues are available to estimate the year the photo was…
Gerald
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28
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9 answers

How should place names be recorded?

I have been entering place names into genealogical records from smallest to largest location (i.e. town/locality, county/parish/district, state/province, country). Where one part is not known, I have used the double comma (i.e. town/locality, ,…
Darren
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What tools exist for collecting and managing evidence?

There are lots of standalone software packages as well as websites which appear to be primarily based on a pedigree view - start from me and work my way back. These systems seem to take the view that there is one unique known truth, but this is…
Mat
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What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman Numeral?

While using an old (1907) book of transcriptions (on-line) The Parish Register of Gargrave in the County of York , I was puzzled by the number of dates recorded in the 16th and early 17th centuries that could be read easily as Roman numerals except…
Fortiter
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27
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7 answers

One tree, or a bunch?

I have spent a considerable amount of time creating family trees on Ancestry.com, and documenting them with records found on Ancestry, FamilySearch, and in other web and non-web sources. For a variety of reasons, wound up with more than one tree for…
Gene Golovchinsky
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7 answers

How many ancestors alive 1000 years ago does a person have on average?

I was thinking about something the other day (that is probably stupid), and thought this would be a good place to talk about it. If someone wanted to draw its family tree over the last 1000 years, he'd write a binary tree with a depth of about 40…
Yann
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5 answers

Is a Birth/Marriage/Death Certificate a primary source?

Do I accept a Certified Document as a primary source and trust it outright or do I need to view the original the Document is transcribed from?
Amy
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