Your Quick Tips, 23 February 2009

Saving Ankle Power
The “Ankle Power” quick tip, where a visit to the cemetery to see for ones self paid off, reminded me of a tactic my husband and I used when searching through older cemeteries.  We assigned ourselves rows and used binoculars enabling us to scan fairly large sections quite easily.  It helped save the ankles and time.  This obviously works only with standing stones but nevertheless was a help.
 
Louise Hawley

Thinking about Christmas 2009
Christmas 2009 is still ten and a half months away, but it’s not too early to start thinking about what you can give to the family that will be appreciated by all.  For this past Christmas my husband’s niece went through years of photos taken on Christmas Eve when the entire family gathered.  She tried to make sure that everyone was included.  Going back to the 1950s she had quite a collection when all was done.  She then had her fourteen-year-old daughter scan them and create a CD which present the photos beginning with the earliest year to the most recent in a moving gallery arrangement that showed how people changed throughout the years.  After the presentation, all the married couples (aunts/uncles/cousins) received their own CD.  This also provided copies of photos which may have been in only one branch of the family.  Now if anything happens to these photos, there are plenty of copies elsewhere if a duplication is needed.

Debbi Geer
St Ann, Missouri

Finding Lost Females
Often the female children, or female siblings of your relative, are “lost” in the census once they marry and move away from home. Or perhaps they were sent to live with others to work or care for another family’s children, as my grandmother and her twin sister were.
 
A couple times I found sisters who were on the 1900 census as children were not found again until the 1920 or 1930 census.  On the later censuses I found them through locating their widowed mothers, identified as the mother-in-law of the head of household.  Now her married name has been discovered, it’s possible to search back on a previous decade’s census for her with her husband.
 
Anne Witzig

If you have a suggestion you would like to share with other researchers, send it to: mailto:[email protected] . Thanks to all of this week’s contributors!

Quick Tips may be reprinted, with credit to the submitter, in other Ancestry publications, so if you do not want your tip included in a publication other than the “Ancestry Weekly Journal,” please state so clearly in your message.

One thought on “Your Quick Tips, 23 February 2009

  1. When reading about Louise Hawley’s tip when researching a graveyard it reminded me that when I painstakingly made a list of graveyards ‘inhabitants’ and their resting places at Kingston Church, Dorset, England I found talcum powder to be invaluable. It highlighted the neglected lettering on the gravestones and made life much easier.

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