Location, Location, Location August 9, 2017

I took this photo at Land's End in San Francisco

www.thefhguide.com

When we think about researching our family history and finding records it is all about location, location, location. We need to know about the places where our ancestors lived, the local history at the time, the boundary changes. etc. As we learn these things we come to know our ancestors so much better.

When we traveled to Wales and saw where our ancestors lived we gained so much knowledge about them. The land is a character in their story. It's almost the same with Google Maps where you can virtually walk the streets where they walked.

There is an abundance of locality resources available online. It comes as no surprise that The Family History Guide has a ton of help when it comes to locations, jurisdictions, maps, gazetteers and more. Learn about topography and geography and migration patterns and much more.

On the Home page on the Family History Guide, Select Projects: Project 9: Countries/Ethnic: United States: Goal A2: Learn About Location and Geography as Search Tools: Step 1. Watch this video. I learned a lot in 20 minutes.

My challenge for you is to watch this video today. Crista Cowan has hundreds of good videos on Ancestry. I plan to spend a lot of time in this section of the Family History Guide as there is so much here that is essential to good research and getting to really know your ancestors. Join me at <www.thefhguide.com> Link to Crista's video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI-lJCYxQlE

I took this one with my iPhone traveling across the SF Bay Bridge

 at 50 miles per hour. (As the passenger of course.)

Can you guess our location?  

We live just a few miles away from this, our favorite city!

San Francisco, California!

Starting Our Research in The United States~Start With What You Know~ August 3, 2017

Pinterest

www.thefhguide.com

Most of us want to know about our immigrant ancestor, the one who crossed a border or crossed an ocean to come to America. Unless we are a first generation immigrant we have work to do with US records first. We start with ourselves and then our parents, etc. Always working from what we know to what we don't know. You just cannot skip the more recent ancestors in favor of looking for an 8th great grandfather. We build our tree one generation at a time adding records to verify our conclusions as we go. Project 9 in The Family History Guide is very helpful in understanding what kinds records are available, what they contain, and how to analyze them.

(Project 9 has this exact same types of information for other countries as well. Scroll down to a country and check out what is there in Project 9.)

If you are a new to family history look at the home page, Project 9 Goal A1: Understand US Records and Their Uses. Scroll through the choices and select a 3 minute video, as an example.

One of my favorite things on the page for this Goal A1 is found in Choice C: Using The Record Selection Table for Planning US Research.

It will have you select some information you would like to find and shows you what type of record to use to get that information. The Family History Guide has given us this great gem! I wish I had known about this years ago! In a few minutes today you can gain some new, excellent resources to use and share with others. One step and one day at a time we can do this!