Family History   

This class covers the immigrants of each of the original 13 colonies and the bet genealogy records to be found for each of those groups. Surprisingly, these records are plentiful, and the majority can be found online. Records types include: property and land records, early military data, data from books, church and civic records, and immigration records. Key sources include different specialized collections, libraries, and genealogy societies.

This class focuses on strategies for finding the original locations of our emigrating ancestors. Examples are provided for the most common European emigrants as they came to America in different time periods. Three different major emigration waves will be discussed: (1) the pre-1820 time period, (2) the period from 1820 to 1900, and (3) the time period after 1900. A variety of online sites will be discussed.

This class uses a "how-to_ approach to show the detailed steps used to extend a family tree using DNA results combined with regular genealogy data. One example shows how DNA data provided the means to define a 5th generation Revolutionary War soldier. Another example illustrates the process to find and verify new ancestors back in the 6th and 7th generation. With recent new features in the big DNA companies the value of DNA has increased markedly along with the ease of finding new ancestors.

This class offers case studies to illustrate seven different strategies to find challenging ancestors. These strategies are (1) collaborating with other genealogists such as distant cousins; (2) using the major genealogy search engines including Google; (3) searching genealogy books, both online and offline; (4) researching property and other financial records; (5) broadening your search to include different locations and different data categories; (6) making use of DNA data; and (7) finding specialized on-site data.