Genealogy: Finding and Accessing Undiscovered Sources to Help Advance your Research
Laura Scalzitti Laura Scalzitti

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.

Read More
The Best $50 I’ve Ever Spent as a Genealogist — updated for 2023

The Best $50 I’ve Ever Spent as a Genealogist — updated for 2023

Most genealogists, myself included, cannot afford to purchase every item on our genealogy wish list. If we could – wow – my mind can barely list the possibilities fast enough: DNA tests, including Y and mitochondrial DNA kits going out to cousins around the globe. . . subscriptions sites? Sign me up for ALL of them. . . . Record retrieval services in repositories around the world?. . . .maybe . . . or would I prefer to spend my time traveling the world, going from repository to repository, obtaining those records for myself? And then there’s books. So. many. books. . . . Continuing education, genealogy institutes and conferences, etc. etc. To quote the song by Queen, “I want it all!”
Ok, back to reality – because that’s never going to happen.
No, we all have to pick and choose how we spend our genealogy dollars with the hope that we receive the greatest return on our investment

Read More