If you use Ancestry.com to research your Irish ancestors, you’ve probably encountered civil registration records that list three-month or one-year time-spans for an event such as birth, marriage or death. Believe or not, that date doesn’t show when your ancestor was born, married or died. For example, I found an…
If you are an American of Irish Catholic descent like me, you have probably hit a wall once you reach Ireland because it’s so easy to find people with the same name as your ancestor. Or, perhaps you’ve found it too easy for the same reason, and haven’t look as…
If you have Irish Catholic ancestors like me, you have probably hit a wall once you reach Ireland. When Conan O’Brien had “Who do you think you are” producer Lisa Kudrow as a guest on his show in 2015, Kudrow said “Irish Ancestry is tough, because… you all have the…
Already watched my Genealogy 201 video about Find-a-grave? Here’s a tip about how to assess the validity of Find-a-grave’s “non-cemetery” burial memorials, as well as an advanced technique to crack into Ancestry.com’s search indices. There is one type of Find-a-grave memorial that I almost always reject: non-cemetery burials, which includes…
Here’s an advanced tip to determine the quality of data from a Find-a-grave memorial by examining the memorial’s creator. In my Find-a-grave Genealogy 201 video, I recommended you only consider information inscribed on a gravestone as fact, since you can’t know the source of any of the other information on…
When using Find-a-grave, only rely on information you can see on a picture of the gravestone. Why? A gravestone is a primary source document: shortly after (or before) the deceased passed away, someone who knew them, probably a close family member, ordered the tombstone. Everything in a Find-a-grave record…
My wife and kids aren’t directly related to any George Sloughs, but after all the work collecting every single Slough record I could find in Pennsylvania so I could prove my wife’s ancestry through one of twenty Jacob Sloughs, I probably have the most detailed collection of raw data about the Slough…
Sorry for the background noise–that’s the dishwasher. This few minutes of video is just a sample of the past hour+. A typical night with Quinn. A typical night with Quinn from Michael O’Neill on Vimeo.
While researching the ancestry and descendants of twenty Jacob Sloughs, I uncovered a great deal of information about all men with that surname who were born before 1800 and lived at least part of their lives in the Colony and State of Pennsylvania. One of these men, a Philip Slough…
At least twenty. Who lived in Pennsylvania before 1800. After 1800? I shudder to think. My paternity leave project this past winter was to figure out the mystery of my wife’s third-great-grandfather, William Slough. Or more accurately, that of his father, Jacob Slough. I think I figured it out, but…
