The Two Best Places to Begin Researching your 20th Century Veteran’s War Service
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the last eighteen years as part of the military community; Or perhaps it’s because I grew up in a family largely comprised of history buffs. But in any case, I find that many Americans have a desire to learn more about their ancestors’ War time service, particularly that of the First and Second World Wars.
Genealogy: Finding and Accessing Undiscovered Sources to Help Advance your Research
When researching our family genealogy, we will all reach a point where we feel we have exhausted the records that are available to us. . . and maybe we have. But when we reach this point in our research we should not yet throw in the towel, but rather start to think outside of the box. You see, chances are, even if you feel like you’ve reached the end of the road, it is still likely that some records exist somewhere which name your ancestor that you have never considered or maybe have considered too inconvenient to pursue. Additionally, there may be resources out there which may NOT directly name your ancestor but could help to give a much fuller picture of their life and times. So how do you learn what records are out there, and perhaps more importantly, if you are geographically separated from those records, how do you go about accessing them? Here are a few tips I’ve learned over my years as a genealogist.
Chicago Genealogy’s Most Well-Kept Secret; Or Chicago’s German Genealogy Gold Mine.
If you have Chicago ancestors and are familiar with Chicago area research, you may already know about some record sources and strategies that are unique to Chicago. For example, you may know that Chicago streets were renumbered in 1909 and 1911. A Street Renumbering guide can be found at the Chicago History Museum .
If your Chicago Ancestors were Catholic, you may know that many Chicago Catholic Church records are digitized at FamilySearch. You may also know that many of these record images are not indexed and may require searching for your ancestors’ records by parish.
You may know that historically, working class Chicagoans typically preferred the Chicago Daily News to the Chicago Tribune. You can access digitized versions of the Chicago Daily News at Genealogy Bank.
You may also know that tracing your Chicago family before 1871 may prove difficult given the record loss from the Great Chicago Fire.
But chances are, you have not heard of Wesley Johnston’s website titled 45,000 Images of Newberry Library Chicago German Records Microfilm.
The One Thing I Do Before Starting a New Genealogy Research Project
All good genealogy projects start with known information. We use known information to lead us to sources and records. We then use those sources and records as steppingstones to lead us to unknown information. Probably without exception, if we use this method, we will eventually find ourselves researching a locality or a topic such as a religion, an ethnicity, an occupation, etc. with which we are unfamiliar.
Why 2022 Promises to be a Banner Year for Genealogy Research!
Learn about records to be released in 2022