We all have them. In fact, we probably have more than one. I’m talking about those families or individuals that we just cannot locate in the census. My Kelly family is one of them. Although I go back periodically and check for them, I just can’t seem to find them in 1860 and 1870, despite having other records that indicate that they were in New York City for at least a few years in the interim.

Every once in a while I have another crack at locating them, and this week was one of those times. As I reviewed what I had and the challenge ahead, I had to ask myself some questions to see if I had missed anything.

Have Your Checked for Misspellings and Mis-Transcriptions?
“Thank you, Captain Obvious!” I think misspellings and mis-transcriptions are probably the first things we suspect when we run into a situation where an ancestor is not where we think they should be. But what have we done to address this situation? Misspelled or mis-transcribed–they’re still lurking out there. Here are some tricks: Continue reading →

Not long ago transcripts of the 1851 and 1861 census returns of Scotland were added to Ancestry. They are valuable additions to the British census data for two reasons, they straddle the start of Scottish civil registration which began in 1855 and they make it possible to search all of mainland Britain for elusive ancestors.

From 1851 onwards all British census returns recorded the following details:

• Location information: census district, sub-district, civil parish, street address
• Name (of every person in each household)
• Relationship to head of household
• Marital condition (single, married, widowed)
• Age, listed in one column for males and in another for females
• Rank, profession, or occupation
• Birthplace
• Disability, if any Continue reading →

from George G. Morgan 

One of the most impressive collections of online African American genealogical materials can be found at the Afro-Louisiana History and genealogy website. The database, created by Dr. Gwendolyn Hall, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University, consists of a vast collection of materials discovered in 1984 in a courthouse in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Included are documents delineating the background of approximately 100,000 slaves brought to Louisiana during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The database is searchable by name, gender, racial designation, and plantation or origin, and will be invaluable to many African-ancestored researchers. You can find this site at www.ibiblio.org/laslave.

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More on Organizing Contacts in Outlook
I have another way of organizing contacts in Outlook. When you enter a new contact in Outlook and update older ones, there is the possibility of assigning that contact to a “category.” Look in the lower right corner of the Contact window. Press the button and a pre-established list of categories will open. New categories can be established and that way all persons tied to Granger, Fairbairn, or whatever can be put in a category together. This capability also allows each contact to be entered into more than one category, so if someone was in the Granger line and the Fairbairn line, they could be in each category. If someone is using Outlook 2003, you can then look at all of our contacts “by category” and so a single e-mail could be prepared to all of the Granger contacts.

This method allows all names of contacts to be simply their name, not a personal descriptor that will go out on their e-mail address.
 
Larry S. Couch Continue reading →

The year was 1843 and in Edinburgh, more than 400 ministers broke away from the National Church of Scotland in what is known as the “Disruption of the Church of Scotland.” Protesting government interference in the church, these ministers gave up their livelihoods to create the Free Church of Scotland.

England was at last joined to the Continent through the first tunnel under the English Channel. The first tunnel under the Thames River was made possible by the invention of a “tunnel shield” by Marc Brunel. Begun in 1825, Brunel’s tunnel opened in 1843 and was used by more than a million people in the first four months. (Thanks to everyone who caught my error! A good reminder to read more carefully. j.s.)

Travel was also improving in the United States. The Republican Compiler (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) for 24 July 1843  reported the following:

Speed in Travelling [sic]—A party left New Orleans on the 30th of June, at quarter past six, and arrived at New York on the 15th of July, at a little after four, having stopped a day at Niagara. They went by the way of St. Louis, Illinois, and the upper lakes, performing a journey of upwards of three thousand miles in fourteen days, without making any extraordinary haste or enduring any particular fatigue. Continue reading →