Articles by Paul Rawlins
Tonight on NBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? Kim Cattrall Searches for Her Missing Grandfather
Kim Cattrall’s grandfather disappeared 70 years ago in Depression-era Liverpool, England. On tonight’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Kim travels to England to discover the reasons behind his disappearance, which still haunts Kim’s mother and aunts decades later. Family historians take note: Kim starts her journey with little more than her grandfather’s… Read more
Consular Marriages—When in China…
The Consular Reports of Marriage, 1910–1949, database that went live this month is a fun one if you happen to have an ancestor among the certificates and correspondence contained in the files. I say these reports are fun because, while there’s a story behind any record, these stories come with the extra flair of a… Read more
Black History Month—Unearthing the Past
Folks log on to Ancestry.com to locate lost siblings, scare out family skeletons, and, of course, find ancestors, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using the site to establish the provenance of a piece of pottery. April Hynes’s grandfather Robert Strang unearthed this fantastic face jug in Philadelphia in 1950. It’s… Read more
Black History Month 2011 at Ancestry.com
In honor of Black History Month 2011, Ancestry.com is releasing thousands of new records and sharing African-American family research success stories on the Ancestry.com blog.
U.S. Passports Update—Do You Know Your 4 Passport Types?
Passport applications can be great finds, with names, birthplaces, parents, occupations, and other details. Our latest update to the U.S. Passport Applications, 1795–1925, database added almost 250,000 new records to the collection, and they include four different types of U.S. passport applications. I didn’t know there were four types until recently, when the NARA website… Read more
WWII Prisoners of the Japanese—Filling the Gaps
A few weeks back, I introduced the launch of a new collection, WWII U.S. Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941–1945, by sharing the story of Gene Jacobsen. Maybe it’s the dramatic circumstances behind the capture of many of these POWs that makes for the dramatic stories surrounding this database. Stories like Gene’s—or Ari Self’s. “Ari Self… Read more
Four New AJHS Collections, Thousands of Stories
Wars play out on both the epic and the personal stage and leave behind both large and small stories. The four new collections from the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) that recently went live on Ancestry.com include two sets of war records: WWI Serviceman Questionnaires, Jews and Non-Jews, 1918–1921, and Undated, and WWII Jewish Serviceman… Read more
Digging into Deaths of American Citizens Abroad
Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad is, I admit, a rather specialized database—though it was just bolstered by a major update that fills in the years 1910–1962. These are records created by American consulates overseas when a U.S. citizen (other than military personnel) died within their district. My people are pretty much homebodies, so… Read more
Vital Maine—BMDs, pre-1892–1922
If Virginia is for lovers, as the bumper stickers would have us believe, is Maine for writers? As I was doing some background research for the new Maine vital records (births, marriages, deaths) that just went live on Ancestry, it got me wondering what was up with all the poets and other literary types who… Read more
An American Century—Sears Catalogs Memories
If you want a great family history conversation starter for the Christmas holidays, mention that Ancestry.com now has almost 100 years’ worth of Sears catalogs online—and keep a pen and paper or a recorder handy. I gave the collection (and the conversation) a trial run with my family over Thanksgiving. I mentioned that we had… Read more
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