(Part 2) Best products from r/Genealogy

First of all, you need to look at the actual record. People who transcribe this information make errors sometimes, so the actual record may be different from the information listed here.

This record is great, but you will need to do some double checking. If you go and look at the original record, I would be pretty certain that the names, the marriage and the marriage date and place are correct, but there is - of course - always room for error.

What's on your side is that this information is a marriage record, so it was most likely provided by the people listed in the record themselves. Unless they had any reason to lie (and people sometimes did!) then it's most likely true to the best of their knowledge. People still sometimes get information wrong, so it's always best to verify. But this record is full of information and clues so have fun with it!

For more info, I suggest you check out the book Genealogical Proof Standard and read about building a solid case.

I use a Scandoo DNT hand scanner when I'm visiting. It writes to internal SD card and runs on standard AA batteries. It's really portable and has allowed me to 'take home' many documents and photos.

I will say that it's not the most reliable piece of kit - roller scanners never are because you need to manually roll them slowly down the page in a straight line. I've found the best solution is to scan something 3 times and then choose the best version when you download from the SD card.

To be honest, even with its quirks, it's probably the best solution for portable scanning. An auto-fed portable scanner would limit you to loose A4 pages.

Best way is to pick a goal! I know that sounds silly but doing it helps.

The best way to start is to just concentrate on the direct line from you/the home person. That way you can just skip worrying about the 5th/6th cousins trees and just work solidly backwards. When you hit a brick wall go back to the start and start working in records that match your info and build up more detail.

Key is to actually make sure the records back up all your info - birth, death, who their parents were, marriage, etc.

Don't trust the other people's Trees on Ancestry!! Too many people just spam "add, add, add" and it's junk data. Only add trees that match with information you already know - then verify the data they add to your tree.

That way you'll have a great, and well researched tree.

I would STRONGLY recommend this book to help you get on the right track of what genealogical "proof" actually is.

I have a similar handheld scanner, and while it does work pretty well, it requires a lot of practice to get a good scan. I've scanned things thinking I did a great job of keeping it straight and going the right speed, only to get back to my computer and find that someone's face is stretched out because I messed up ever-so-slightly.

Overall I like the scanner, but a photo of the item in question, taken with a good camera in decent lighting will be just as good. I'd recommend getting a good digital camera and portable tripod instead.

Thanks for sharing!

One of my personal faves is my 6th and 7th g-grandfathers' longtime business partner, Enoch Freeman; a land surveyor and attorney in what is now Portland, Maine. Freeman outlived his wife and some of his children. By the time he died, the burial ground lacked space for Freeman to be interred with his own family. His solution, which clearly had posterity in mind, as did the stone you shared, was to therefore list a directional azimuth to his family's gravesite, from his own. His stone reads:

This Stone is erected to the memory of the late Honorable Enoch Freeman, Esq'r, who died Sept. 2d, 1788, aged 82 years. His wife lies near and four children, S. I7" W. 4 or 5 Rods from this Grave

If I remember right, only one stone among his wife and children had survived the years -- therefore making Freeman's directional message, carved by Bartlett Adams, a terrific source of information!

In my experience very common. My great uncle, Edward Porter, has written eight books, The Porters of Colonial Maryland 1778-1996: Their Descendants and Some of Their Related Families, The Horns of colonial Pennsylvania 1740-1999 of Washington County: Their descendants in North America and some of their related families, The Olivers of Cardiganshire, 1778-1993: Their Descendants in Wales, England and North America and Some of Their Related Welsh Families, among others.

I have also come across dozens of others, especially the Mayfields, Starbucks, Gibby, Traver, and other Palatine German lines, on sites like Hathi Trust, Archive.org, and google books. They are definitely out there to be found. Many are wonderfully sourced, others not so much. But usually if you check the sources and look through old mail list and forum archives to see if people have pointed out errors in the books, you will find a great deal of work has been done to get you started, and you can then use sources which have since become available (like census records and other newly scanned historical documents) to make verifications and corrections as you find them.

I bought this handheld scanner and it works great. It's light, easy to pack, and scans very quickly. Like another poster said slight movements can be aggravating, but most of the time the scanner auto corrected the movement and the rescan I did was unnecessary.

No need for a computer as it uses a microSD card for storage, some would see this as a pro or a con since they can't view the image on a monitor. You can however inspect it on the small display of the scanner, it will at least help determine if it scanned at an angle or if anything was cut off. The quality is top notch and it saves in either PDF or JPG at Lo (300dpi), Medium (600dpi), or Hi (1050dpi). ($89.95)

Additionally, it works perfect when I need to scan large media, but don't want to use a camera capture. Take multiple swipes of the piece, a poster say, and then stitch the multiple files in Photoshop later. Viola, high resolution scan. The scans are limited to 8.5" wide, but can go on indefinitely as far as I can tell.

TaoTronics® 1050 DPI 1.44'TFT Color Display Colour & Mono Handheld Scanner for Document, Photo, Reciepts, Books + JPG/PDF Format Selection

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I've also used Genius Scan+ through all of college and genealogy work in a pinch. It does a great job of preserving a book page, screen cap, or board, but I wouldn't count on it to preserve photos unless I had nothing else. (Free/$6.99)

Genius Scan+ by Grizzy Labs

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And I use this scanner for when I have no carry restrictions. A computer is required and I need multiple power outlets, but it has the best scan quality by far. A huge plus is that it can neatly scan negative strips with an included accessory. ($174.84)

Canon CanoScan 9000F MKII Color Image Scanner

Griffiths Land Valuation (I think that's what it's called?) Are land holder records and lessee records. Since so many records in Ireland were destroyed it's a good way to find families. Problem I've had is everyone in Ireland had the same names, so it's hard to suss out who is who (I have to put 'maybe' on a lot of suggested records on Ancestry, you just don't know for sure if Paddy O'Connor with a wife Anne and a kid Mary is the right one!) It really helps to know the general area or even better, the parish your ancestors were, which is really really hard to find out if you don't know. I read this book https://www.amazon.com/Paddys-Lament-Ireland-1846-1847-Prelude/dp/0156707004 which is incredible, and figure my ancestors are represented pretty well in that book. Since I don't know their names or anything, it's the closest I could get to walking in their shoes. And it really puts into perspective what our Irish ancestors went through, and shows the tenacity and bravery of the ones who immigrated.

Edit: Fun fact! My DNA from Ancestry updated, and they narrowed it down to Munster and Connaught for me. Which is interesting since Burke is my mom's family name and the Burkes aka de Burgho had estates in Connaught and Munster since 1100. So that's neat!

I would start by clarifying which way they were fleeing. I'm having difficulty imagining why they would flee from England to America unless they were providing some kind of material support to the revolution, and I've never heard of a case involving that. There were supporters of the American revolution in England, and simply being in favor of it was not illegal. If you're certain that they were fleeing from England to America, there is some scholarship on British support for the revolution, including this book: http://www.amazon.com/British-Supporters-American-Revolution-1775-1783/dp/1843830116

On the other hand, there were many British loyalists in America who did flee (usually to Canada), and others who were fined or punished. There are a lot of records relating to loyalists. Some are published and fairly easy to access; others might take some digging--one of my cousins recently found a court record for a family member fined for harboring a loyalist, for example. Some loyalists fled to Canada and later returned.

The style outlined in Evidence Explained and Evidence! are the standard for genealogy (at least in the United States) if you are a professional or publishing. That said, the goal in citing your sources is to make sure someone else can find them later with little effort. This Genealogy Source Citations Quick Reference by Thomas MacEntee also has a good overview of genealogical citations in general.


I also use these two Quicksheets all the time. They are easy and help build good citations (they are by ESM again, so in the EE style):
Quicksheet Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images
Quicksheet Citing Online Historical Resources
(I got a deal on them from a vendor at a genealogy conference less than what they cost on Amazon) I also bought Evidence Explained used which saved some money.

I second /u/mycrea: TIF with LZW compression is a good choice for lossless. Disk space is cheap, although you should ensure that you always have TWO identical copies on separate hard drives, stored at separate physical locations.

You can get an external hard drive with 1TB for $75 (probably less if you're in the US). If you just want the drive, 3TB model sells for $120 or less. In short: it's relatively cheap. The cost of a hard drive stays pretty constant, but the cost per unit storage space keeps decreasing (there's a hard drive storage analogue of Moore's Law).

I usually keep the original TIF scans in a separate folder on an archive hard disk, rather than my main computer. On my main computer, I keep a JPG copy. I use IrfanView, an incredibly useful tool for digital images, to batch process to make smaller JPG copies. I also upload all of my scans to Flickr as JPG images (still high res). This is a good extra-backup step (e.g. here's my online archive).

One thing that you should be careful of when scanning is that some scanners in their automatic settings apply filters which modify the scanned image to make it look crisper. I avoid these because it is automatically throwing away data permanently and can limit one's ability in the future to restore old photos, etc...

When scanning small photos (say under 2" x 3"), use an even higher resolution (e.g. 600 or 1200 ppi), as you can get a lot of detail out of them.

NO lamination.

Gaylord Archival supply sells on Amazon and are a good company. Hit up your family for gift cards to Amazon to help defray costs as this stuff is expensive.

Paper can be stored in archival folders (they look like manilla or white ones but are acid-free) or poly folders. (FYI, I blow through tons of these from B&H, they seem more affordable than the gaylord ones.)

Put anything fragile in the poly sleeves, as close to the size as you can. (Or, in other words, don't let it bounce around in a sleeve that it too big, nor be damaged by one that is too small).

ONLY buy poly folders that are PAT" passed. It will be in the description or a little logo and is the only certification that matters. You will see all kinds of "archival-friendly" terms which are meaningless.

I put my tintypes in a photo sleeve and then into a box. Between each, I put a piece of felt (craft store) or heavy acid-free paper so they don't scratch each other.

Newspaper is the most frustrating as no matter what you do, it will continue to yellow and become brittle. The acids in the paper destroy it form within and only de-acidifying will slow it. But this is expensive and may destroy the piece. Make newspaper your scanning priority.

If you protect the individual items you can skip, for now, the super-expensive archival boxes and use regular boxes. As long as the items are safe, in a climate controlled environment, have pretty even temperature year-round, and no smoke, regular boxes are fine. Invest in protecting each item first—that will give you more bang for your buck.

BTW, a flatbed scanner works GREAT for scanning tintypes. Just invest in a stand-alone scanner with the highest resolution you can find. The kind attached to a printer is not made for photos and not worth scanning with. I like this model as it scans slides and negatives, too.

Scan documents at minimum of 300ppi (archives scan at 600ppi) and photos at minimum of 600ppi. The smaller the image the higher resolution you should scan. Save images as TIF or PNG, not JPG.

Also buy some back-up drives and/or a cloud subscription. You will chew up hard drive space but hard drives are cheap. Backups and cloud storage insures that you are protected in case your hard drive dies (which they do) or your house burns down.

Lastly, you can buy cotton gloves but many archives now prefer clean hands to gloves. When wearing gloves, it is almost impossible to feel what you are grabbing, and very easy to damage paper. Wash your hands well before handling materials and you should be fine.

Source: I'm an archivist(ish—still in school).

UPDATE: Had wrong B&H link. Fixed.

If you're looking for a book for kids to start filling in and learning about their family tree then 'This is Me and This is My Family Tree' by Nicky May is a really good one to go for.

You can find it on Amazon and it has great reviews: http://www.amazon.co.uk/this-family-tree-Multi-activity-Ragged/dp/1857143914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416822003&sr=8-1&keywords=this+is+me+and+this+is+my+family+tree

There's also 'My Family Tree Book' by Catherine Bruzzone, available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Family-Tree-Book-First-Record/dp/1905710151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418136160&sr=8-1&keywords=kids+family+tree

I featured the top one on our blog post 'A Genealogy Book For Every Research Problem' if you want to see other useful genealogy books too :) http://blog.perane.co.uk/a-genealogy-book-for-every-research-problem

First be polite and be prepared for more brickwalls, before you got into genealogy, how would you react if some stranger walked up to you and started asking you questions about their family/history/past... it can get creepy really fast.

I always start with in personal visits first. Be polite, and introduce yourself and how you are related. Be sure to list DIRECT relationships... they may not know who their GREAT Aunt is, so you may have to explain how you are related.

When asking for information, start with dead people... or people you don't have much information on. Once they warm up to you, you can start asking for information about the living. I have found that by providing them with something they may know about someone is a good way to break the ice. You have to build a relationship (if you don't already have one) with these people and sometimes that is a bit of a challenge.

If you have any documentation from people they would know, Pictures and records, bring those along. I don't know how many times I have brought pictures of family with me, and they are usually pictures that they have not seen. Once the pictures are out, most of the time it turns into a "you showed me yours, let me show you mine".

If you don't have a portable scanner, get one (This is the one I use). Get scans of whatever they will let you scan, even if they ahve old books, flip though them and if you find anything that is hand written scan that, you never know where a small piece of information will lead you. Don't ask for the original. Sometimes they will be interested in providing you the original, but 8 times out of 10, they won't.

Don't forget about them. After you get the information, ask for an email address, and send updates, don't just use them for information and never talk to them again, most of the time people will appreciate being included in your research.

I have a listserv I use to subscribe people that want to keep up with updates that we have made.

And that is about it, just remember it can get awkward quickly, so having some ammo of familiar information will warm them up nicely...

Their chip is only able to do certain things, and from what I gather they prioritize ancestral information over other types of information. In other words I don't believe you will end up with all possible types of information about yourself (see below).

But when my grandfather sent his test in, the website linked us up as grandfather / grandson as soon as it analyzed the two of us. In other words I think his data was up for a day before they did got around to comparing his data with mine. I guess they have to just constantly make comparisons when new people get results. I'm sure the same thing will happen with my mom and grandmother, when they do send theirs in.

Here is an example of something I was hoping to find out, but their chip doesn't have it. Amylase has to do with how well a person can handle starches versus simple glucose sugars. More amylase copies means you can handle starches better. Less amylase copies means you can handle simple glucose better. I guess I should say allegedly, since I don't really know I just read it in a book.

https://www.23andme.com/you/community/thread/16254/

Here is the book where I read about amylase:

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Food-Pyramid-Politics-Interests-ebook/dp/B00HFKX24Y

I don't know about her but I would love one of those Flip Pal scanners.

There are memberships to historical societies like NEHGS or other, regional ones.

If she makes scrap books of her ancestors, maybe some scrapbooking equipment or supplies. Or a subscription to a magazine with ideas for that.

Maybe a subscription to a genealogy magazine.

Does she like "Who Do You Think You Are?" (the Tv series)? If so maybe a DVD player that can play all regions and a box set of the BBC series. We like the British version so much better, don't know about others.

if you like you can read the first couple chapters for free using amazons "look inside" here: https://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Explained-History-Artifacts-Cyberspace-ebook/dp/B015YDZJ7Q