by Judy G. Russell | May 5, 2022 | General, Resources |
The whole thing, AI-created It was already a game-changer when, on the first of April, the 1950 U.S. census images were released by the U.S. National Archives (NARA): using handwriting recognition software, NARA had produced a basic down-and-dirty index of that census...
by Judy G. Russell | May 3, 2022 | Methodology, Resources |
Find the judge, find the court It was a fairly typical post that landed in The Legal Genealogist’s Facebook feed, a day or two or three ago. A genealogist had found a newspaper article about a rascal of an ancestor but wasn’t able to find the court record...
by Judy G. Russell | Apr 27, 2022 | Court Cases, Resources |
Just launched: Find Case Law Americans looking for copies of court opinions have it easy. No, really. The Legal Genealogist wouldn’t kid you about that.1 With the digitization of thousands of volumes of published court opinions dating back to the start of the...
by Judy G. Russell | Apr 6, 2022 | Methodology, Resources |
Noting the census takers It’s right there in the best practices of the field of genealogy. The guidance that so many of us overlook, especially when we’re starting out. But it’s stated clearly, in Standard 40 of Genealogy Standards, focusing on...
by Judy G. Russell | Apr 4, 2022 | General, Resources |
Patience, grasshopper… patience!! No, it isn’t fully indexed. No, it isn’t searchable in every field. No, the descriptions of the enumeration districts aren’t down to the street level in every case.1 Yes, it’s often necessary to review...
by Judy G. Russell | Apr 1, 2022 | My family, Resources |
1950 census site is no joke The Legal Genealogist freely admits it. I was a skeptic. I really truly didn’t expect the 1950 census release by the U.S. National Archives (NARA) to go smoothly. In fact, at 10:22 p.m. EDT yesterday, I posted a snarky “let’s...
by Judy G. Russell | Mar 30, 2022 | Methodology, Resources, Statutes |
Official typos It’s right there, in one of the most important laws ever passed by the early Virginia state legislature. Just nine years after the Fifth Virginia Convention proclaimed that Virginia was a free and independent state,1 and just four years after the...
by Judy G. Russell | Mar 29, 2022 | General, Resources |
Ancestry launches ED finder tool It’s an impressive piece of work — and it’s going to save the bacon of a lot of otherwise frustrated genealogists (including The Legal Genealogist, for sure) in just a few days. Ancestry has launched an enumeration...
by Judy G. Russell | Mar 24, 2022 | Primary Law, Resources |
Freedom tiptoes into Pennsylvania The Legal Genealogist spent essentially every day of elementary school, junior high school, and high school in the public schools of the north. We studied the Civil War in different ways in different years. And the one sentence I...
by Judy G. Russell | Mar 22, 2022 | Methodology, Resources |
Just read this A Pennsylvania genealogist, Tammy Hepps, has a lesson for us all, The Legal Genealogist included. It’s about that census… … And, more particularly, about that census taker. It’s an absolutely brilliant study of one enumeration...