Before I started working at Ancestry.com, I thought cemeteries were creepy. Sure, they were great places for flowers and remembrance a few times a year. But if you didn’t actually know one of the residents, you definitely didn’t want to pop by. 
I would have never predicted that four and a half years later, I’d be [...]

I can count my first cousins on one hand and still have a thumb to spare. So when author and family historian Crista Cowan told me how many living cousins she had tracked down in the course of just a handful of years, I was floored. 
Crista would have needed nearly 1,000 of my hands – [...]

I learned a lot while preparing our September/October issue of Ancestry magazine: what the house my mother was born in looks like today and how I could order a 1939 photo of it from the city of New York; what my grandparents’ experiences arriving at Ellis Island would have been like (how did a new [...]

It seems like I know more about everyone else’s family history than my own.  That’s how things work when you put together a magazine: you get very involved in the subject but from a third-person perspective. My own family hasn’t made it any simpler: they throw things away, forget to tell stories, and have surnames [...]

Was there ever a more perfect day than Halloween for a cemetery shot? This photo was forwarded to Ancestry magazine by Ancestry.com subscriber, Lisbeth Schoenfeld Rogers. “I was visiting my sister in New York and I took a drive to the cemetery in Orange [New Jersey] because I have ancestors buried there by the name of [...]

I grew up in a family that never volunteered for anything that didn’t have a paycheck attached to it. I always attributed this to the fact that my parents were children of the Depression, and any time or money they had to spare was to be saved—just in case. Now that I have a family [...]

One of my favorite parts of my job is finding history—actual, real, personal stories—in old records, even when that history doesn’t directly relate to me or my family. So while editing an article on hidden identities for the November/December issue of Ancestry Magazine, I decided to see if I could find examples of hidden identities in the records at Ancestry.com.
In the article I [...]