A Quiltwork of Lives

05/28/2023

This Free to Use set features family registers, family trees and photos, maps that document land ownership and more.

03/02/2023

We are very excited to announce that 39 "Free Negro Registers" have been digitized and added to Virginia Untold!
https://bit.ly/VaUntold-FreeRegisters

Several Free Registers have indexes available with their digital images in the Virginia Untold collection, allowing you to search by name for those locations. To help index the remaining registers, sign up for an account on our transcription platform, From the Page, and contribute your skills and knowledge: https://fromthepage.com/lva/virginia-untold-free-registers-indexing

Find Free Registers from the following localities: Alleghany County, Amelia County, Arlington County, Bedford County, Charles City County, Chesterfield County, Dinwiddie County, Fairfax County, Fauquier County, Goochland County, Henrico County, King George County, Lynchburg City, Powhatan County, Roanoke County, Rockbridge County, Rockingham County, Southampton County, Surry County, Westmoreland County.

These are just the first 39...we have more to come! This work is made possible by a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant from the National Archives.

02/24/2023

Use our free guide to learn how to use compiled genealogies in your family history research.

02/17/2023

FREE ACCESS* to our entire newspaper collection now through Monday! Use the link below to search 22,000+ papers in the largest online newspaper archive! What will you discover this weekend?

USE THIS LINK FOR FREE ACCESS: http://nwspprs.com/longweekend

(*Free Access only available through the link in this post. Terms apply. Free Access ends 20 Feb 2023 at 11:59 PM MT.)

03/04/2022

Land records can be wonderful research resources.

We're headed into the second day of ! Learn about land records with our three-part series "The Lay of the Land: Using American Land Records in Your Family History Research."

Watch now at: https://hubs.ly/Q015h-zx0

Understanding the basics of land records requires learning a suite of new terms such as grantor, grantee, deed, metes, bounds, and state versus federal land. This series introduces the family historian to the unique language of land research. It also covers the steps for acquiring a parcel of land and the paper trail the process generates.
Discover how to use land records to locate an ancestor at a place and time, confirm kinship, supply biographical data such as marital status and occupation, and help disentangle common names. Once the family historian understands the language and process of creating land records, they can apply that knowledge to genealogical problems.

The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged mass settlement of federal lands in the frontier, resulting in millions of records documenting the transfer of public land to private ownership. Learn how these land entry case files can assist in researching your homesteading ancestors. With David Allen Lambert, Ann G. Lawthers, and Melanie McComb.

03/04/2022

Cool way to view some great maps!

One of the more comprehensive atlases is Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, by Charles O. Paullin, published in 1932. This tome of nearly 700 maps is available through Internet Archive as a digital book. HOWEVER...

Even cooler is the interactive digital version provided by Digital Scholarship Lab of the University of Richmond. They have reproduced all of the maps and overlaid them on a modern map, and have even animated series so you can see the changes over time. It’s just a pretty neat tool 😀

The atlas itself has a variety of maps, covering topics such as:

✅Transportation

✅Population

✅Churches

✅Military

✅And so much more!

Be sure to watch the short Introductory Video to learn more about this great resource.

Head on over and check it out 👇
https://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas

02/04/2022

We're officially one month away from RootsTech 2022, and we couldn’t be more excited to connect with you and help you connect to your family history.

Have you registered yet on rootstech.org? Let us know! 👇

02/04/2022

WE'RE ALMOST DONE with funding for the land grant shuck digitization project! We have applied the recent donations (thanks!) along with those who had not designated a specific county, and are left with 6 counties needing only 5 reels each (in purple). Please visit http://nchistoricalrecords.org/shucks/ for details.

02/03/2022

Ready for Part 2 in my PERSI series?

In this part I take you on a tour of the new PERiodical Source Index (PERSI) database recently released by the Allen County Public Library. Plus, I share how I track what I find in PERSI (and I share my Excel template too!).

Head on over to the Genealogy In Action blog to learn how to search PERSI for the best results.

https://www.genealogyinaction.com/blog/persi2

08/18/2019

Using the New York Public Library's Map Warper, map lovers and history buffs can find old maps by their location, and align them with present-day locations.