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Who took the tally?

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...

Kwitcherbitchin

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...

Time travel with NARA

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...

When the law is wrong

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...

Getting ready for Friday

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...

In March of 1780

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...

And about that census…

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...

A different set of vital records

Of the four-legged kind… It’s just a handful of pages of records in a book of town records from Shaftsbury, in Bennington County, Vermont, that FamilySearch has labeled Births, marriages, deaths 1765-1893 vol 1. After 24 pages of marriages starting in 1785...

Rumsey Maps to be text-searchable

Annotating the names on the maps In the spring of 1862, the city of Corinth, Mississippi, became a flashpoint in the U.S. Civil War between troops under the command of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard and Union forces under the command of Major General Henry...