That lie under oath…
Perjury... or false swearing? A lie under oath is a lie under oath. But that doesn't mean all lies under oath are equal in the eyes of the law. The issue came up for The Legal Genealogist in a pair of reported court cases. One is kind of an oddball case, out of New...
Year 20… never forget…
20 years later For 20 years, it has sat close at hand. It's not much to look at. An old plastic film canister, the kind that 35mm film used to come in, back in the day. Film of the kind I had in my pocket that day in September 2011 when my friend Toni asked me not to...
The 31st state
Recording California The Preamble was short and sweet: Whereas the people of California have presented a constitution and asked admission into the Union, which constitution was submitted to Congress by the President of the United States, by message dated February...
Labor Day 2021
First Monday in September No matter how fast or slow any particular summer seems to be, it always seems to catch The Legal Genealogist by surprise. It's the first Monday in September. Here in the United States, today is the first holiday of the fall: Be it enacted by...
Don’t poison that tree
About those small segments... For years, The Genetic Genealogist Blaine T. Bettinger has been warning about the dangers of relying on small shared DNA segments -- those chunks of seemingly shared DNA that come in at 5-6-7cM or thereabouts -- to draw genealogical...
North of the line
Recording the enslaved in the North The year was 1782, the place Windsor County, Vermont. And an eight-year-old boy named Anthony faced a fearful fate. Eight years old. Enslaved. And sold away from his parents. Yes, The Legal Genealogist hastens to note, slavery north...
Those interrogatories…
Standard Southern Claims Commission questions Any researcher who works with Southern Claims Commission files knows the occasional frustration of seeing a detailed report setting out the claimant's answers to what are obviously very specific questions... without having...
Reconsidering that match
What's our tree completeness? It happens all the time. We identify a batch of autosomal DNA matches all in the roughly 15-20 centimorgan (cM) range ... and they all have the same couple in their tree. Oh boy!! Our most recent common ancestors (MRCA)!!! Um... not so...
New portal for Freedmen’s Bureau records
Ancestry launches indexed record set There’s no way to overstate the value of the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — an agency that became known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It’s a record set that extends far beyond its name to just about...
The lure of the sale
Maybe ... just maybe ... With all the summer DNA sales there have been out there, and the fall and winter sales to come, maybe ... just maybe ... it's time to think twice. I know. I know. For The Legal Genealogist not to be begging cousins to test, it almost sounds...
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